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Your story doesn't add up to me. > We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fine, so you either (a) tell a business that

Your story doesn't add up to me. > We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fine, so you either (a) tell a business that you have XXX page views per month so they'll get YYY impressions (which may be blocked, but that you can try to make non-intrusive); or (b) you let the advertiser track the value they receive from ads placed on your site. In the (a) case, there shouldn't be any difference between adblock and a fake clicking blocker. In the (b) case, a sensible advertiser should be able to weigh the value of the add they placed on your site no matter what mix of real and fake clicks they get: I ended up selling X USD to visitors coming through that place's ads, which amounted to Y USD in profit. Y > cost of the ads? Keep the ads going. Y < cost of the ads? sorry but we're out. The only situation where fake clicks are bad is that where the advertiser suddenly realizes that "hey we sent you XXX people" is just a meaningless figure from which you just cannot infer a proper value metric to decide whether that ad is worth its cost or not. Which is another way of saying that it gives ad purchasers a reality check that can only be positive in the long run, disregarding the short-term loses of people who were selling inflated ad spaces until now.

chuckdries 9y ago
As I understand it, what we do is closer to B. I'm not on the ad sales team, but the way it was explained to me, our ad partners have analytics on their website like everyone does these days, and they generally give us a link specific to our website that they can look at the analytics on and tell how many people visited that page, therefore how many people clicked the link. I'm told they see huge spikes in traffic that looks fake and get angry, threaten to drop us, etc. Basically they accuse us of artificially inflating our numbers, and without super detailed analysis it's hard to tell what is and is not fake. If you compare the traffic coming in to their affiliate links to the traffic we record on our own analytics, I'm told it looks super suspicious. EDIT: apparently some advertisers have ad content prepared they give us that uses common advertising tools like doubleclick.net and such.

chuckdries 9y ago

As I understand it, what we do is closer to B. I'm not on the ad sales team, but the way it was explained to me, our ad partners have analytics on their website like everyone does these days, and they generally give us a link specific to our website that they can look at the analytics on and tell how many people visited that page, therefore how many people clicked the link. I'm told they see huge spikes in traffic that looks fake and get angry, threaten to drop us, etc. Basically they accuse us of artificially inflating our numbers, and without super detailed analysis it's hard to tell what is and is not fake. If you compare the traffic coming in to their affiliate links to the traffic we record on our own analytics, I'm told it looks super suspicious. EDIT: apparently some advertisers have ad content prepared they give us that uses common advertising tools like doubleclick.net and such.