For more context, in order to help scale hyper-targeted campaigns (such as those which focus on targeting endemic audiences unique to Mantis, retargeting campaigns, etc), Mantis partners with various third-party ad-tech platforms to run campaigns on a broader set of applications and websites (programmatic) that are outside the scope of our direct publisher network.

Further, in order to work in the programmatic ecosystem, many market participants require that all creatives go through an initial (and continuous) review/scanning process. Part of that verification process is to validate the landing page belongs to a real website and is free of malware, viruses, and other malicious content. Because it is possible for advertisers to "bait and switch" the landing page content post-approval (especially with verticals like cannabis, hemp and vape accessories considered "high risk"), these platforms generally will continue to monitor the creatives over time.

Unfortunately there isn't a way to eliminate it from happening. Our system sits between your website and the ad exchanges, which is why we are able to alter the UTM codes to "mantis-bot" to help segment out the traffic as much as possible. It is technically possible for us to simply drop the traffic and avoid the redirect to your website, however this will cause your creatives to fail in the scanning process and ultimately prevent your campaigns from running. While our system can generally tell the difference between traffic that is clearly a bot and what may be considered an ordinary user, these verification systems (especially Google) go out of their way to obfuscate their scanning methodology so that bad actors aren't able to "detect" the scanning process and show a fake landing page.

We (as well as much of the ad-tech ecosystem) share your frustration with how these automated creative scanners pollute traffic statistics and at times can cause load issues. Fortunately, in theory, these events should start to go away over time as scans come back successful, but you can also filter them out on your end in GA if preferred.