londonblue Hello, Heather here I hope you are well. In terms of sending traffic to your site through paid promotions there are a number of different options that you could use. So that we can best support you we recommend reaching out to us if you do wish to experiment with paid traffic and we can then talk you through the advice that we have for each option and the steps that we would like you to take.
Typically for sites that are running paid for promotions we ask for connection with your adsense account and access to a read only copy of your Google analytics.
In terms of suspicious traffic patterns there can be a number of reasons why the Platform Quality team are seeing suspicious traffic. The best way to protect your site from this is to first of all work with your host to check that you have bot blockers in place.
Secondly it's to be mindful of who you partner with and how you write your content for paid ads, link building or guest posting so that from a readers point of view that it makes sense that when they click on a link or ad from one site to go to another that they are accessing content that is inline with what they were expecting to see.
And then thirdly to have a variety of traffic sources that are coming to your site. For organic traffic you can use the tag tester tools to help improve the user experience metrics of your site by adjusting the titles and seeing what impact this has.
We'd also recommend using our guides to help you audit your site as well, for example this article can help you with looking at your big data analytics https://www.ezoic.com/quick-easy-way-to-do-site-review-for-a-better-2023/ and this guide can help you with doing an SEO audit on your site: https://www.ezoic.com/how-to-do-an-on-page-seo-audit-in-12-steps/
In terms of malicious behavior towards your site we don't have any tools directly that prevent this. You can speak to your host to see if they have any tools in place as some hosts can block specific IP addresses from coming to your site. With the ads if this was happening we can stop the ads from showing to protect your standing with Google and then review your sites traffic and move forward from there.