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

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.