Establishing an Advertising Network

How do you prevent cheating?

[ggrot]

If you were to start up an ad network (banners for example), you would obviously need to be able to detect those who were cheating the system and creating false impressions. How would you go about server side?

Some things like statistical analysis to determine if there are too many impressions during a certain time of the day, or looking at user agent percentages, seem to me to be overly taxing on server resources.

What types of things should one be doing to detect impression cheating systems?

[Vitaly]

Hello, ggrot

In our [banner management] software we have in-built anti fraud mechanism that helps to prevent cheating in banner exchanges. For example, if one of the exchange participants wants to earn more impressions in the system and sets up some cheating script (HTTP Getter) that opens the page continuously, this is prevented by AdRevolver in the following way:
if the number of impressions of an adzone on a certain day exceeds the average number x2 (multiplied by 2) per day during the last 2 weeks, this adzone is switched off.
This method is not taxing for the server at all. The larger part of ad-server's resources is spent on processing banner requests.
And of course this method is not perfect. What if the participant sets this script at the very start of his/her campaign? Well, I guess, it will be obvious for the administrator when he/she opens "Fraud control" interface. There, you can find a list of the most suspicious adzones, that are generating impressions irregularly.

Thanks,
Vitaly

[edited by: Drastic at 5:53 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2002]
[edit reason] no URL drops or self promos please [/edit]

[Shakil]

Vitaly,

welcome to Webmasterworld.

I have read about this product and am impressed with what I am seeing so far, as we are researching for a new venture to launch next year.

(btw, you may want to delete the url above, will not win you any new friends around here, and keeps the place spam free)

Shak