The war between fraudsters and anti-fraud solutions shows no signs of slowing. But that doesn't mean we should give up. In this article, we will explore the features Adserver.Online offers to help you fight against bots and invalid traffic.
Disclaimer
- We provide essential functions only. For better protection, you must use third-party solutions
- We do not guarantee we will filter out fraud/bot traffic completely
- We do not guarantee we will NOT filter out real human visitors
Filters
The default filters' configuration is located in the Settings/Anti-fraud menu.
Bad User Agents
This filter allows blocking requests from non-standard browsers or utilities like Wget or Curl. Unsophisticated fraudsters can use these.
Data Centers
Traffic generation software, headless browsers, or scripts are usually hosted on different data centers (e.g., Amazon). This filter allows you to filter out requests from data center IPs.
Proxy/VPN/Tor
Fraudsters may use proxy servers or VPN/Tor services to fake their geolocations. This filter detects requests from IPs belonging to proxies, VPNs, and Tor.
IFrames
Ad code is often placed in small or invisible IFrames, which is a favorite fraudster strategy. This filter tries to detect if the code is running in iFrames.
Note that you must NOT use this filter if you are going to publish our ad code on other ad networks. Third-party ad networks may put our code into IFrames, preventing it from working correctly.
Domain Matching
Enabling this filter will ensure that the ad code is placed on the correct website and that the traffic also comes from this website.
Due to technical limitations, this filter only works correctly with JS-based ad code (e.g., banners, wrappers). Unfortunately, it may not work correctly with other ad formats (e.g., VAST). Also, this filter is ignored for Direct Links.
3rd-party filter
Enables third-party provider. See below.
Filter actions
The system may take different actions when one or several filters trigger.
- Show ads, no stats (default). If selected, ads will show as usual, but no impressions/clicks will be saved. Billable ad requests will be counted as usual.
- No ads, no stats – nothing will be displayed, and no impressions/clicks will be saved. 0.5 billable ad requests will be counted.
- Divert to Fallback Tier – server will select campaigns from Fallback Tier only. All stats will be counted as usual.
- Divert to Fallback Tier, no stats – same as the previous, but no stats will be counted except billable ad requests.
Third-party Traffic Validation Providers
Besides build-in filters, we support the following 3rd-party integrations:
In this article, you can learn how to configure traffic validation providers.
Be aware that third-party filters only apply to clicks (banners and similar formats, VAST) and redirection-based formats (direct links, popups). Hence, they don't apply to impressions, views, video events, or conversion tracking.
Reporting
In the stats report, you may enable the "TrafQ, %" column, which stands for Traffic Quality—a higher percentage means higher traffic quality. Note that this calculation is based on built-in filters only (third-party providers not included).
Fraudulent Traffic Ignoring
It's not a secret that publishers may provide low-quality traffic or (try to) cheat to increase their revenue. Unfortunately, it's become a part of our life.
To mitigate the effect of fraudulent activities and low-quality traffic, we have implemented a special feature that allows account owners to keep their revenue under better control by "ignoring" a set percentage of the publisher's traffic. To do that, you should specify the default percentage of clicks and impressions to be ignored in the corresponding fields in the Settings / Anti-fraud menu.
Our ad server processes advertisers' and publishers' stats separately; this feature only affects publishers' stats. Their stats (in owner's and their own panels) and revenue will be reduced according to these settings. At the same time, advertisers' stats remain the same.
For example, if you set the zone's fraudulent impressions to 10%, then ~10% of all impressions of that particular ad zone won't be added to the publisher's stats.
These settings do not affect advertisers' stats in any way.
Website Ownership Verification
If you want to be sure that your publishers actually own the websites they claim to own, you should enable the "Website ownership verification" option.
This option will force publishers to verify their websites. After submitting a new website or changing the URL of the existing website, publishers will be redirected to the verification page.
There are three verification options available (commonly accepted by the industry):
- HTML-file upload
Publishers need to upload a special file to the root directory of a website. - HTML META-tag
Publishers have to insert META-tag into the HTML code of the main page of a website. - DNS-record
Publishers have to add a TXT record to the DNS zone of a domain.
After successful verification, the website status will be either approved or pending, depending on your "Websites post-moderation" settings.
Settings Applying
Be aware that changes in anti-fraud settings do not automatically apply to existing zones but will only affect new ones.
If you'd like to change existing zones, please do it manually via the Anti-fraud section on the particular zone form or use the bulk zone updater in the Services / Zone updater menu.