Advertisers pay for views, clicks or sales. But not every view comes from a person, and not every click is intent. Part of the traffic on any network is invalid: it does not come from someone who could see the ad and be interested in it.
Where invalid traffic comes from
- Data centres. Requests coming from servers, not from phones or home computers. A real person rarely browses from a data centre.
- Bots. Programs that visit pages, sometimes to index them, sometimes to fake visits and clicks.
- Repeated events. The same view or the same click sent several times to look like many.
- Anomalous patterns. Volumes and rhythms no human audience produces.
Some of it is innocent, like search engine crawlers. Some of it is fraud, made to charge advertisers for something that did not happen.
Why this costs you money
If you pay per thousand views and part of them are invalid, you are paying more for each real person who saw the ad. And your numbers look worse than they are: a campaign can seem to have many clicks and few sales simply because the clicks were nobody's.
The worst part is not knowing. If the network does not show you what it filtered, you cannot judge whether what you paid for was real.
How adPluga filters it
- Every event is signed and accepted only once. It has a short lifetime and replay protection, so resending the same click does not count twice.
- Invalid traffic is filtered before it counts: data centres, bots and anomalous patterns.
- What is filtered shows in the dashboard, next to what was valid. You see both numbers, not only what was left.
- What is filtered is charged to nobody. Not to you, and not paid to the owner of the space.
What to ask any network
Whichever network you use, ask three questions:
- Do you show me how much was filtered, and not only what was charged?
- Is what was filtered charged?
- Are the numbers I see the same ones that feed the invoice?
On adPluga, all three answers are in the dashboard: the filtered traffic shows separately, it is not charged, and views, clicks and conversions feed straight into the financial statement, which only grows and is never rewritten.
A valid view is the first step. The second is knowing whether it was actually seen: that is what the article on what counts as a viewed ad covers.