We do NOT use click farms and don’t buy on any exchanges that do. A click farm is a form of click fraud, where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links for the click fraudster (click farm master or click farmer).
The way it works is the exchanges have their own measurements and safe guards that they use to protect each account from fraudulent traffic. This allows us to filter campaigns and exclude domains which display ads on pages with adult content, domains with poor viewability stats and domains with suspicious activity. The suspicious activity filter excludes domains which have demonstrated evidence of suspicious activity in the past, such as bot traffic, ad stacking and other fraudulent behaviors. Traffic that is considered invalid on our exchanges is automatically removed in our system and is not counted in their reporting or billing BUT MAY STILL APPEAR IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS SINCE GOOGLE ANALYTICS REPORTS ALL TRAFFIC. Again, clients do not pay for anything the platform deems questionable.
We do not optimize for clicks either – it is an outdated metric that doesn’t measure client intent which is why we optimize for conversions on the client’s website and instore visits (with Mobile Conquesting) – the true indication of whether or not the ad was effective. Visit tracking data is verified by third party, Numerator (who purchased Info Scout in 2019).
In Google Analytics and other analytics software, geographic traffic can show as outside the area we are targeting if the users are connecting through a server that is located in another city or state. An example of this is a person who lives in Syracuse but is connecting let’s say through a work connection and that server is located in Miami, the analytics will show that as a hit from Miami even though the person is physically located in Syracuse with their device.
The reason that Google Analytics reports traffic from outside of the targeted area is that Google Analytics leverages a different location signal than what a mobile app/websites reports back to us during ad buying. Typically, a mobile app leverages a user’s IP address which is associated with a phone carrier’s IP (like Verizon, ATT…etc.) which are generated through centroids (cell phone hubs or towers) across the US. This can sometimes cause UTM codes to report geos hundreds of miles away, even though we are only buying locally. With mobile browsing, if GPS isn’t enabled on a phone, the location data reported to Google Analytics could also be cached showing their last known location from where their latitude/longitude was derived.
In addition, Google uses bots to audit and click on ads (mostly in their hubs, like California and Florida) to test ads before they go live and during a campaign. Google Analytics (or other analytics programs) will register these clicks, with a 100% bounce rate and zero seconds on the site. Sunnyvale and San Francisco are the two biggest auditing sites, which you can see in your Google Analytics Channels report. But these impressions are immediately credited back to the advertiser, but still show in the report.
Mobile traffic is particularly hard for Google Analytics (and other analytics software) to track correctly even with UTM codes. When someone sees the mobile ad inside an app (and most mobile inventory is in apps) and then clicks to the client’s website the app does not pass the tracking code to Google Analytics. So when Google Analytics is seeing the user visiting your web site, it sees it as no referral code and it will deem the traffic to have no source and therefore assign that referral traffic incorrectly as Direct traffic and as an immediate “bounce” (recording it as zero time spent on the advertiser’s website). Or the website/app name may be passed but not the tracking code and so in that case Google Analytics will list it under referral traffic but still as an immediate bounce with zero time spent on the advertiser’s website.
If something truly is deemed fraudulent, again, those impressions are credited back to the advertiser’s account by the exchange but still would show in analytics reports.
← Frequently Asked Questions