What incentivized traffic is

In Yandex Direct’s help, incentivized users are people who are paid to complete a task. Their clicks are classed as fraud, next to bots and fraudulent software. A form a live person filled in for a reward on your own site is not invalid traffic. Those are two different payments, and the cabinet does not fold them into one row.

Below is how Google Ads and the MRC standard describe the same payment, and where the line falls against a reward on your own page. The four parties to an empty click, including this person, are listed in who clicks ads. The full list of what the filter leaves on the bill on purpose is in invalid clicks.

Direct classes a paid task as fraud

The antifraud guide splits invalid traffic into fraud and accidental clicks. It puts into fraud the clicks of bots, fraudulent software, and incentivized users who are paid for a task. The browser and the hand can be real: the guide separates these people from a program and still puts the click in fraud.

A separate dictionary entry titled “incentivized traffic” is not on the pages checked here. This article stays with that wording and does not stretch it to every discount or promotion.

An accidental click in the same split is different. The guide’s example is repeated unintended clicks on one banner. The person who pressed has no task and no payment. The guide does not ask you to confuse a repeated banner with a person who was paid.

Google writes about a placement that pays for the click

The Google Ads guide includes, among examples of invalid traffic, deliberate clicks by people with no interest. Among them are competitors who drive up your spend, and placements that pay users to click. The second group is the closest to Direct’s wording about a task for money: the placement pays, and the person does not need an interest in buying.

That is a Google Ads description, not a field in a Direct cabinet. You cannot carry a placement’s name from there into a Yandex report: Direct does not promise that label.

A reward on your own site is a different case

The same Direct page says a form filled in for a reward is not invalid traffic. Next to it on that list are repeat conversions in different visits, a repeat of the thank-you page, a wrongly entered contact, and fields filled in off-target. A reward you yourself promised for sending the form is not pulled out of conversions by the filter.

In this case your site pays, not a placement paying for a click on the ad. A rise in leads “for a bonus” therefore does not prove the incentivized click from the guide, and does not prove the opposite. For the conversion, the guide leaves the form on the bill. For the click of a person paid to do a task, it chooses fraud. Those two decisions cannot be stacked into one cause.

The MRC standard keeps incentivized activity in the harder class

The MRC addendum of June 2020 lists incentivized human activity among the SIVT examples: situations that are harder to notice and for which a routine check is not enough. The GIVT and SIVT classes are covered in GIVT and SIVT. Direct’s word “fraud” is its own bin. The document does not ask you to equate that bin with SIVT.

There is a separate caveat in the same place. Disclosed reward programs that do not aim to spoof measurement should not be mixed with this category. An open bonus on a form and a hidden payment for a click, for a measurement report, are not one example. Direct does not repeat the MRC caveat in its own guide: a form filled for a reward simply is not invalid traffic there.

An on-site visit check looks at several independent observations: behavior, the browser environment, the network and address, request frequency, and the ad-click parameters. A single weak signal, including request frequency alone, is not enough to keep a person out. Scores and the rules of individual checks are not published.