AOL users & same IP

[masterblaster]

There is one problem: I've heard that more AOL users share same IP at the same time or in a given period of time. Can someone tell me how are you solving this in your search engines. I mean, somehow you must know if this user already made a click to save it as invalid or valid click.

The other problem I see is that advertiser won't pay for 3 unique clicks if they were made by 3 different users all sharing same IP.

Ideas?

[webdiversity]

We've always found AOL visitors to be great. The fact they share the same IP is a problem, but I'd rather they came sharing an IP than not coming at all.

[masterblaster]

Yes but if you are getting results from XML feed from big guys, they won't pay for such traffic (same IP). If you pay to Affiliates this calculation simply won't work.

[TrffcSndrs]

masterblaster, are you asking from the point of view of a PPC Search Engine owner or as an advertiser?

[masterblaster]

PPC owner.

[daroz]

They come from the same IP address because of the AOL Proxy servers...

If you use SSL pages (yes, more overhead etc..) you will force a bypass of the proxy servers and obtain the users direct IP.

[masterblaster]

but still... will they have unique IP's? Will this be internal IP's?

[daroz]

The IP you get from the SSL connection to an AOL subscriber is the IP address assigned to their individual computer. That is to say, for the most part, IPs gathered from AOL via HTTPS are similiar to IPs from most other non-caching ISPs.

There is always the possibility of address reassignment where a person goes to your site, hangs up, and someone else gets that IP address and visits your site.

IP addresses are only part of a picture to determine 'uniqueness'.

[masterblaster]

this is true (only a part) but somehow this solution looks best to me. We could be checking cookies, browser type, etc. but I dont think this is reliable, especially cookies. I had tons of problem with spammers because of cookies. So my questions are:

1) how do i make that https working (will be slow, but maybe I can bound this to AOL users only?)

2) what "other ways" do you suggest to successfuly track the user (instead of using IP only).

thanks!

[aspdaddy]

>other ways

You can use referer and time heuristics but it is much more complicated