Click fraud is an issue the search industry deals with on a daily basis. At Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL), we have developed effective standards, business practices and methods with the goal of eliminating invalid clicks affecting search marketing. ASL's click purification process is designed to protect our customers from being billed for invalid clicks.
How does the targeted keyword process work?
- Visitor searches for a keyword on a partner's site
- The partner site sends a request to the ASL advertising system to generate listings for the keyword
- The ASL advertising systems sends back appropriate listings with click tracking information embedded in the listings
- Partner site displays the set of listings for the site
- Visitor clicks on a listing
- Partner site sends embedded click information back to the ASL advertising system
- ASL sends the visitor to the Advertiser's site
What is an invalid click?
Clicks can be marked as valid or invalid. Valid clicks are clicks on a listing that are generated by humans, whose intent we judge to be to engage the advertiser's site (such as to make a purchase, register for services, or navigate content.). Invalid clicks are clicks generated by robots, systems or software whose intent we judge not to be to engage the advertiser's site.
How does Ask Sponsored Listings identify Invalid Clicks?
ASL uses proprietary software to track and evaluate the validity of each click in real time before you are billed. Our analysis team proactively reviews daily delivery logs across the network for irregular patterns in click volumes and costs on a vertical basis and make network adjustments.
The purification process reviews a broad array of factors to assess the validity of each click.
Invalid clicks include;
- Unmatched clicks:
The click could not be matched to a valid impression entry. The purification process must match each click to its corresponding impression to get more information about the click. ASL does not track sensitive information such as the dollar value of the click in the Click URL, but instead in the logs from the impression event. Impression logs are generated internally to ASL, which prevents access to this sensitive information.
- Multiple click: There are multiple clicks on the same listing for the same visitor, more than once within a 2 second time span. A visitor that clicks more than once within 2 seconds could be someone trying to inappropriately inflate clicks to that website.
- Robotic traffic:
The click came from a known robot IP or user agent. Robot filtering is done based on a list of known robots. The list is updated when we notice anomalies in our reporting.
- Mangled URL:
The click appears to have a mangled click URL such that the URL is not in an expected format.
- Blocked Referrers:
The click came from a referrer that we've chosen to block because partners have identified this referrer as sending invalid traffic. Some sites can scrape the result pages from our partner's sites and are displaying those results as their own results pages. We do not count clicks from such pages as traffic from our partners.
- Stale click:
The click happens 24 hours after its matching impression. This can be the result of book-marked search result pages.
- Test listing:
The click was associated with a test listing. Any new partners with questionable traffic sources are assigned a "test" tracking code before receiving a "production" tracking code. This allows the ASL advertising system the ability to track some initial idea of the performance and click validity from this new partner.
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