Help Center For Advertisers Overview

What are the protections against click fraud?

Our ad server employs many techniques to prevent false and invalid clicks to ensure accurate reporting. Some of them are listed in this article while some are confidential to prevent violators from creating a trick/hack to bypass these measures. The same techniques are also used to ensure impressions are recorded accurately.

Known Bots

By default, our ad serving engine blocks known bots, spiders and crawlers. We maintain and frequently update a list of user-agent strings and IP addresses of known bots, web spiders and crawling software. You can change this setting from menu "My Account / Profile" under tab "Settings".

Click Authentication

Each click is checked against a unique token to ensure it is from a valid source. Any click without a valid token will not be recorded.

Click Monitoring

Our click monitoring system checks all incoming clicks and uses sophisticated algorithms to detect unusual patterns. Possible invalid clicks and impressions are automatically flagged and reported to our engineers for analysis and investigation. When a source is confirmed, it is added to the blocked list.

Ad Restrictions

You can apply different ad restrictions and targeting to protect against fraudulent activities. The same restrictions that allow or prevent visitors from viewing ads will also apply to clicks.

For example: If a click is restricted (eg: "Do not show the ad to visitors in China") and a visitor from China tries to click that ad, they will see an error message (eg: "This ad is restricted and no click was recorded") instead of getting redirected to the advertiser's website.

Blocking or Excluding IP Addresses

You can block or exclude specific IP addresses, or IP ranges from viewing and clicking on your ads. There are two ways: it can be applied as a restriction onto the ad, group, zone or campaign. Or it can be an account-wide policy, you can edit the block/exclusion list in your account profile.

Prevention Tips

Keep your contact email up-to-date for our notification message on suspicious activities
Monitor the click reports and check for unusual patterns
Apply suitable geo-targeting to limit visitors from the right countries, states, or cities
Set a maximum quota on daily/monthly clicks so that someone with an automated tool cannot inflate clicks over a certain limit even if you do not have time to monitor
Apply frequency capping and/or time capping to limit any visitor from seeing or clicking the same ad too often

Monitoring your own Account

It is recommended that you know how to monitor your own account for these malicious activities. There are several reports that can help you reveal potential click frauds:

Frequent Click IPs: lists all IPs with multiple clicks to your ads. You can access this reports from menu Reports / Advanced. For certain regions, your visitors could come from a few IP addresses, which are the central proxy servers for that Internet provider. For other cases, your ads are targeted by a third party using sophisticated, automated tools or manual effort, with the purpose to inflate clicks. Please check if you recognize these IPs. If they are not respectable or known ISP's proxies and not your office's IPs, you should block them from generating more clicks.
Unique/Gross Click: reveals the number of duplicated clicks. You can access this reports from menu Reports / Basics. A low Unique/Gross percentage means a high number of repeated clicks, which could mean the clicks were artificially inflated by automated tools.
Detailed Clicks: displays a limited number of detailed click records. It shows more information about the visitors who clicked on the ad. You can access this reports from menu Reports / Visitors / Detailed Clicks.