Better bot detection on click

[prosperent brian]

Today we rolled out a new update that does a better job of determining if a person clicking on a prosperent url is a bot or a human. This change will give you a better representation of actual clicks in your Prosperent Analytics. We expect a decrease of approximately 2% in the overall number of clicks network wide as a result.

[Hoops]

Just curious - Let's say you determine that a certain click is a bot but then Prosperent is notified of a sale as a result of that click. What happens then? I assume publishers would be credited their cut but how would this be reflected in analytics?

[prosperent brian]

It's the same as any other click. If a sale were to somehow take place (highly unlikely), the sale is reported the same as any other sale. It's all transparent to you.

[prosperent brian]

We updated this once again with more data that we have been collecting. A couple months ago we setup a bot trap on our clicks. basically, it's code that only a bot would have access to, and only a bot would ever execute. We then record the ip and useragent associated with any access attempts. We now have quite a bit of data and rolled out an update to filter those clicks from stats. This again gives everyone more accurate reporting. Don't be alarmed if you see a slight decrease in clicks because of this, it's just junk being filtered more accurately

[haisictir]

I don't know how and why ... but I have an install with bunch of domains using apis (mfpu ) since 2-3 days I`ve got an increase of the clicks un-naturally ( well I`ve build allot of back-links on this domains and just moved the install on dedi machine ... ) but the clicks increased by 10X+-20X+ maybe more . Unfortunately not increasing of sales recorded .

[prosperent brian]

You probably have a bunch of junk traffic on your sites. You need to send us over the correct ip and such in your api calls, or handle bot detection and processing on your end. Most API users don't send us over the info we need to filter things properly. There are some great server side scripts that help with that through. Look at installing something like ZBBLOCK (http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php) on your server. That helps you block unwanted bots. I would also look at packages like google analytics so you can accurately track where your traffic is coming from. Last, you can also look at services like cloudflare which reverse proxy your traffic, speed up your site, and provide various levels of filtering on your traffic. Lots of options, and all need to be done on your end

[haisictir]

Will look into ZBBLOCK , thanks for advice . About analytics well ... to be honest I simply hate them I don't wanna keep that bits nowhere on my domains ... never ... About cloudflare I`ve tested before on other vps of mine the server got ridiculous amounts of requests from cloudflare network this caching service maybe works for some installs but for me wasn't working at all , well to be honest I don't even care about the BW used anyway I don't reach the limits for the servers ... I don't mind if the stats are inflated at the end of the day what it's important are the results ... and until now things looking promising for future plans

[prosperent brian]

What you describe with cloudflare is normal with any CDN. Basically, here is how it works.

A request comes into your site. Cloudflare checks their cache to see if they can serve the object (page, image, html, css, whatever). If the object is in their cache, it gets served from their server. If it isn't in the cache, it gets forwarded to your server, served to the end user and cached on the cdn. All of these requests will come from the cdn, so you are going to see almost all of your requests coming from cloudflare unless you are passing the non proxy ip to your analytics script (which there is a variable you can use to do so).