Changing Metric Settings
Anti-Fraud Kit allows you to modify the Anti-Fraud Metrics selection or the Time To Install Metric thresholds so you can customize this feature in a way that works for you best. Some metrics might not be very useful to your specific case. For example, the Known Data Centers metric will flag traffic coming from VPN services, and if you expect that kind of traffic in large volumes in your campaign funnel, you might consider turning this metric off. Customizing the Anti-Fraud settings is a matter of your knowledge and experience. However, there are some aspects of how Voluum measures traffic characteristics that you should be aware of.
How Voluum Measures Traffic
The incoming traffic is checked against selected metrics immediately when it reaches Voluum. The measurements are performed live. The outcome (suspicious traffic and Time To Install values) is saved and showed in your reports. Due to the large amounts of data Voluum processes every second, there is no option to perform calculations again for past data and change already saved outcomes. Changing metric settings is not like changing filtering options, where data is displayed according to selected filtering options. Changing the metric setting changes the calculation method of suspicious traffic and TTI values. It does not affect your stats (visits, clicks, revenue, etc.) in any way.
How Changing Settings Affects Metrics
Taking the above into consideration, the moment of changing metric settings is the moment when past and future suspicious traffic and TTI metric values start to differ from each other. A direct comparison between those two data sets is not possible because those values were measured and calculated using different settings.
Consider the following case:
From the moment of enabling the Anti-Fraud Kit feature for your account on 15th of October, you have looked at suspicious traffic values with all Anti-Fraud Metrics selected. Your suspicious visit and click values were oscillating around 15%. On November the 1st you decide that you wanted to disable the Known Data Centers metric, as it was continuously flagging traffic coming from VPN service providers. On that day you changed the metric settings and deselected this metric. You immediately noticed a drop in your suspicious visit and click values to around 7%.
On November 15th you create a report for the last 30 days. This report shows a drop in suspicious traffic values. But the drop is only virtual, your suspicious traffic has not been affected. Changing metric settings does not influence the incoming traffic, it only influences the way it is being flagged.
Conclusions
In order not to mess up your suspicious traffic data, follow the rules below:
- Remember when and what changes to the metric settings you have made to reliably compare suspicious traffic data and observe trends.
- Remember that changing metric settings does not influence incoming traffic, it only changes the method of how its characteristics are measured.
