If you’re an affiliate marketer or internet marketer of any kind, you almost always run  into bot clicks or any other genre of unauthorized clicks during your advertising campaign.  While it’s important to capture the originator’s information, it is just as important to scrub those unauthorized / invalid clicks from your metrics.

Simply put, bots and crawlers (since I’m not not going over click fraud specifically in this blog) can throw off your metrics.  If you generate 50% of your clicks from bots, and your tracking technology ‘counts’ them, your conversion rate, for example, is going to be more off than you’d like.  In fact, at this point, the metric could be considered unusable.

How do you stop these legitimate mechanisms from ruining your metrics?  Filter duplicate IPs, but still record them. You should filter them to have accurate data to determine various advertising performance metrics, but they should be recorded separately so you can take an action upon the unauthorized source, should there be a need to do so.

Here’s another useful tool:
Check the IAB for known Bot / Spider Ips.  The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has one of the most comprehensive lists available so you can look up known fraud, bot, crawler/spider sources and compare/remove them from your data so that your end metrics are as accurate as possible. You can find the list here: http://www.iab.net/sites/login.php

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Josh's Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.