Myth: scaled native traffic is mostly real because it's "in-feed."

Myth: scaled native traffic is mostly real because it's "in-feed."
No. A lead-gen advertiser scaled a native source from $400 to $9,000/day and watched the numbers. Form fills held a steady cost. Looked clean.

Then they logged hour-of-day for completed leads. A flat plateau from 1–5am local time, every night, identical volume. Humans don't fill insurance forms at 3am on a metronome.

They added a hidden honeypot field and a 1.5s minimum time-on-form. 41% of "conversions" from that source vanished overnight. Real cost-per-lead was 70% higher than the dashboard claimed.

The source never showed bot signals in CTR or viewability. It showed them in the shape of the conversion clock. Are you looking there, or at the pretty top-line?