Anyone actually getting real clicks on casual encounter ads

[johncena140799]

So this has been on my mind for a while, and I figured I’d throw it out here because I can’t be the only one dealing with it. Has anyone else noticed how hard it is to tell if the clicks coming into casual encounter ads are even real? Sometimes the numbers look great, but when you check the actual responses, it’s like a ghost town. It made me wonder if half of those clicks were even humans.

For a long time, I thought something was wrong with the way I set up my ads. I played around with different images, changed the wording, and even shifted the targeting a few times. But the same problem kept coming back. Tons of clicks. No real conversations. If someone was clicking, they definitely weren’t messaging. And that’s when the whole idea of bots messing up the numbers hit me.

It’s annoying, especially because casual encounter ads rely so much on people taking action in the moment. If the traffic isn’t real, nothing moves. You feel like you’re shouting into the void. I’ve seen people joke about bots, but for me, it wasn’t funny. It was actually messing up my budget and making every adjustment feel pointless. Like how do you fix something when you don’t even know what’s going wrong?

At one point, I thought maybe my niche was just slow. Maybe the timing was off. Maybe people were clicking just out of curiosity. But even that didn’t fully add up. I’ve run enough ads to know the difference between low engagement and fake engagement. And this stuff felt fake.

So I started paying closer attention. Not in a fancy analytics way, just simple things. I watched the locations of the clicks. Some were nowhere near the places I targeted. I checked the timestamps. A bunch of clicks were coming in at weird hours with almost robotic timing. I also noticed the bounce rate. It was basically instant. One-second visits. Click and gone. No scrolling. No checking the profile page. Nothing.

That’s when I started testing a few small tweaks. Not huge changes, just enough to see if anything shifted. For example, I added a basic question to the landing page. Something only a human would bother to answer. Bots don’t care about small friction points, so they bail instantly. Real users stick around a second longer.

I also narrowed my targeting instead of going broad. It sounds counterintuitive, but the wider your ad goes, the more random junk traffic you attract. I tried focusing on a smaller audience and even adjusted the time window for when my ads ran. That alone cut out a chunk of those strange late-night bot clusters.

Another thing I tried was tracking the clicks that led to actual profile views or message attempts. When I compared the numbers, it was pretty clear which clicks were legit. Only a small percent were turning into anything meaningful, but at least now I knew what was happening.

And while digging around, I came across this short breakdown that explained the issue in a simple way. It talked about how to filter out junk traffic and what kind of click patterns usually point to bots. Sharing it here because it gave me a better starting point than just guessing:
Get Bot-free Clicks in Casual Encounter Ads

What actually helped me the most wasn’t one single trick. It was more like a mix of small habits. Things like watching the quality of traffic instead of just the number of clicks. Things like comparing time-on-site and looking at how often people actually interact with the page instead of just tapping and leaving. When I got into that mindset, the whole picture changed. Even the small adjustments started to feel intentional.

I also realized that casual encounter ads naturally attract more bot activity because they’re often placed in high-traffic sections. Anything with “dating” or “adult” in the category tends to get scraped more. So it’s not always something you’re doing wrong. Sometimes it’s just the nature of the category. But that also means checking your traffic is even more important.

Now I feel like I’m getting a lot closer to the real audience. I’m not saying everything is perfect, but the ratio of real clicks to junk clicks feels healthier. And at least now, when I see a spike, I have a better sense of whether it’s something good or just another bot wave.

If anyone else here has played around with casual encounter ads and dealt with the same thing, I’d love to know what helped you. I feel like everyone just silently accepts bot traffic as part of the game, but we’re all trying to reach actual people, not random scripts.