Protection Against Invalid Traffic

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Overview

AdRoll advertisers enjoy the best of what digital and mobile advertising have to offer and can engage with users who have the highest interest in their products or services. To ensure that your ads serve to the right users on the best quality sites, we have a dedicated Trust and Safety team in place for both manual and automated monitoring. We have strict systemic checks to filter out any suspicious activity so that you can get a good night’s sleep knowing that we are protecting your campaigns.

Inspired by our core values, AdRoll continuously strives to do right by the customer and to be open and transparent about everything. Your trust is everything to us. We created this webpage to address invalid traffic, which is one of the safety issues existing in the online advertising world, and to show you how AdRoll works to minimize its impact on the network.

 

What is Invalid Traffic?

Invalid traffic includes both clicks and impressions that might not be the result of genuine user interest. This covers intentionally fraudulent traffic as well as accidental clicks and other mechanically generated traffic.

 

AdRoll’s stance on invalid traffic

We promise to always do right by our advertisers—after all, your trust in our platform is vital to our success. In the rare case that an advertiser is impacted by invalid traffic that slips through our safety checks, we ensure that the advertiser is credited back the complete amount. While there is no simple or permanent solution to completely avoiding all invalid traffic, we take our responsibility to deliver only high-quality traffic very seriously.

 

How does AdRoll safeguard against invalid traffic?

It’s our responsibility to take care of invalid traffic so that you can focus on your campaigns. Over 99% of invalid traffic is caught through AdRoll’s proactive solutions before it can have any significant impact.

  • We work with our supply partners to ensure that they have the appropriate checks in place to pre-filter suspicious publishers.
  • We conduct investigations into individual publishers to eliminate high-risk publishers.
  • Any domains identified as sources of invalid traffic are permanently blocked.
  • We filter out publishers who do not meet minimum traffic threshold criteria.

Finally, we have filter systems in place that scrub data as it comes in. These systems are routinely enhanced to recognize the latest threats, proactively block invalid traffic, and safeguard the integrity of your data:

  • Automated checks detect and block invalid traffic. Our algorithms look for patterns through IP filtering, timestamp comparisons, and click redundancy to identify instances of invalid traffic.
  • Our Trust and Safety team is dedicated to identifying new threats, improving our filtering systems, and running routine tests to monitor system health.

AdRoll takes any report of invalid traffic very seriously. Any reports of invalid traffic are investigated thoroughly by our Trust and Safety team to determine their validity. All findings are used to fortify our proactive systems so we can continue to provide you with the best protection against invalid traffic.

 

Analytics and invalid traffic

Third-party analytics platforms help you collect a variety of granular data about your website traffic. Implemented correctly, analytics can also be a useful tool to monitor for invalid traffic.

  • Make sure you are familiar with how variables are defined on your analytics platform. Understanding how to read the reports is key to being able to identify new sources of invalid traffic.
  • Add UTM tracking codes to your ad URLs to incorporate your campaigns into your analytics reporting.
  • Set filters to remove internal traffic activity from your reports and avoid unnecessary inflation of reported traffic.
  • Routinely update your filters so they continue to accurately exclude bot or spider hits.

Your analytics platform will not automatically filter out invalid traffic, so you will have to be proactive about keeping your data clean. Check your platform’s support documentation to learn platform-specific best practices for data management.

If you use Google Analytics, you can automatically filter out any traffic that matches known bot or spider signatures. To implement this feature (recommended), take the following steps:

  1. Log in to your Google Analytics account

  2. Access Reporting View Settings

  3. Under Basic Settings, look for an option named Bot Filtering

  4. Opt in by checking Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders

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