What to send an ad network for a refund

Lead with identifiers, not percentages

A network cannot act on the sentence "38 percent of my traffic was bots". It can act on a list of zone and placement identifiers with volumes and dates attached, because that maps onto something in their own system. Start there and keep the headline number out of the first paragraph.

Include the evidence, not the verdict

Export the CSV rather than a screenshot. It carries the events, the bot events, and the share per identifier, which lets the other side reconcile against their own numbers instead of taking yours on faith. Reconciliation is what moves these conversations.

Include the reasons. Every verdict stores why it was reached, and "the address is inside a data center range" is a sentence a network can check. "Our tool said so" is not.

Use their vocabulary

Say invalid traffic rather than bots, and separate general from sophisticated invalid traffic. These terms are defined by the industry measurement bodies that networks are audited against, so using them correctly signals that you know what you are asking for.

Be honest about the limits

Send confirmed traffic as confirmed and suspected traffic as suspected. Overstating one row is how a whole submission gets dismissed, and you usually only get one serious look. Our three class output exists partly so you can make this distinction in writing.

What to expect

Most networks credit rather than refund, most credits are partial, and the timeline is weeks. The realistic win is not the credit itself, it is that the source gets fixed or removed and you stop paying for it every month afterward.