Weregeek Comic Invalid Traffic Report

Without giving away too much information, the goal of Activity Based Filtration is to find fraudulent pageviews - which in turn trigger fraudulent ad impressions - based on behavior that is non-human.

In most circles, all bot traffic is considered "bad". However, most respectable bots (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) do not artificially inflate pageview counts nor do they request ads. There are a handful of bots that do not care about any of that, and should be considered "bad". Our fraudulent bot metrics include the bad ones, and the good bots are listed under benign IVT.

Fraudulent IVT traffic is typically traffic that is blatantly not traffic that advertisers would not want to serve on. This is traffic that is meant to look legitimate, but is not.

Benign IVT traffic usually comes from valid sources (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, webpage optimizations, etc.) that most ad servers will not display ads on. However, if these benign IVT pageviews are identified correctly by the adserver, then real ad impressions can be generated.

Barometric looks at the trailing 12 months of IVT data (if available) to attempt to estimate what the future will hold for the property in question. This analysis involves calculating the mean of the lookback period (the orange line in this graph), as well as machine learning from other properties and pixel traffic throughout the Barometric platform.

Note: Two (2) months worth of data is needed to generate the trend line.