Anti-Fraud-Kit: Overview
Invalid traffic is a growing problem in the advertising industry. It generates no income for offer owner yet it skews visit statistics, damages your reputation with an affiliate network platform and may result in real costs.
From this overview, you will learn:
- What is invalid traffic?
- How Voluum can help you with identifying invalid traffic?
- What tools does it offer?
- What you should use them for.
What is Invalid Traffic?
Invalid traffic is any traffic that flows toward your offers without a real interest in them. This may include accidental human clicks, web crawlers or, lastly, intentionally fraudulent traffic that uses different techniques to artificially pump-up traffic statistics. Because of its compound nature, invalid traffic cannot be uniquely characterized solely by one behavior type that could be easily pinpointed and eliminated. Any attempts to identify invalid traffic have to take into account several metrics that might indicate potentially non-human traffic.
The Solution: Anti-Fraud Kit
To combat the problems of invalid traffic, Voluum has introduced the Anti-Fraud Kit. It consists of several tools, aimed at identifying different characteristics and addressing different problems caused by invalid traffic. Because those elements work on different levels, they are available in different places of the Voluum interface.
The tools that make the Anti-Fraud Kit are as follows:
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Anti-Fraud Metrics:
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What is it?
Measurements of various traffic characteristics. Traffic flagged with these metrics is considered to be suspicious.
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How it can help you with invalid traffic?
The AFK Metrics identify patterns of typical invalid traffic behavior, be that abnormally fast or frequent clicks, poor referrer reputation, unrecognized user agent, and more. Studying the origin of traffic flagged with one or a couple of these metrics will let you identify a source of suspicious traffic. Then you can block it in your traffic source platform.
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Details:
Read the Anti-Fraud Metrics article to learn more.
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Time-To-Convert Metrics:
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What is it?
Measurements of how fast a visitor triggers a conversion (app install or subscription). This tool introduces two values: Low Time-To-Convert and High Time-To-Convert. They are both configurable. The TTC Metrics tool reports a number of conversions that have occurred below the Low TTC value, between the Low and High TTC values and above the High TTC value. It also reports the meantime it took your visitors to convert.
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How it can help you with the invalid traffic problem?
You can use this tool to detect unusually fast conversion times that may indicate a non-human origin.
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Details:
Read the Time-To-Convert Metrics article to learn more.
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IP / UA Filtering:
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What is it?
This feature allows you to block unwanted traffic using IP addresses or ranges or user agent names.
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How it can help you with the invalid traffic problem?
If you have identified an IP address, a range of IP addresses or specific User Agents that you suspect of generating invalid traffic, you can block them from ever coming to Voluum.
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Details:
Read the Traffic Filtering: Applying IP / UA Rule article to learn more.
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Honeypot:
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What is it?
This feature generates an invisible link for your landing page that only bots can activate.
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How it can help you with the invalid traffic problem?
Bots that have clicked this invisible link are still directed to an offer's page, but they are also flagged and marked as suspicious.
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Details:
Read the Honeypot article to learn more.
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Anti-Fraud Kit Settings
Some settings of the Anti-Fraud Kit can be configured according to your needs. The configuration panel is available in the Settings view. You can access it from any place in Voluum (apart from the Dashboard and the Settings views) by clicking the 
button.
Voluum Note: Changing Anti-Fraud Metrics selection or Time To Install Metrics threshold values causes the incoming traffic characteristics to be checked against newly set thresholds. Past suspicious traffic and TTI values will NOT be recalculated with those newly set thresholds. Keep that in mind while analyzing variations of those values over time. Read the Changing Metric Settings article to learn more.
To learn more about how to change metrics settings, read the following articles:
Known Bots
Not all bots have bad intents. Some of them go through links of your campaign funnel just to index the web page content. Voluum allows those known friendly bots into your campaign funnel but does not include events generated by them in reports. That means that your stats are not skewed by them, and your pricing plan event limits are not depleted.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have more questions? You might find answers below:
What should I do to stop bot traffic?
Voluum has the Anti-Fraud feature available on higher pricing plans. It looks for patterns typical for non-human behavior. Such traffic is marked in Voluum as suspicious. If you detect large amounts of suspicious traffic, you can stop purchasing this traffic in a traffic source (for example, coming from a certain country or device type), you can re-route it in Voluum with Rule-based paths (to protect your reputation in an affiliate network) or you can install Honeypot link to catch most clicking bots.
