Fraud & Compliance
Motivated Traffic
Users incentivized with rewards to convert — cheap but low quality, usually banned by offers.
Motivated traffic consists of users who convert because they're paid or rewarded to — through cashback apps, offerwalls, reward games, or paid-task communities — not because they want the product. It's cheap and converts at spectacular rates on the front end, but the users have no genuine intent, so downstream quality collapses. Most CPA offers explicitly ban it in their terms, and running it anyway counts as fraud.
Buyers occasionally use motivated traffic legitimately where offers allow incent, or illegitimately to hit CPI volume caps and top-chart positions. The trap is retention: motivated users uninstall or never deposit, so advertisers running Reg2Dep or ROAS checks catch it within one or two cohorts and claw back payouts. If an offer says non-incent only, mixing in even a small motivated blend to pad numbers is the fastest way to lose the whole cap.
In buyer speech
“Volume from that new pub doubled overnight but deposits are flat zero — smells like motivated traffic, cut them before the advertiser runs quality checks.”