Invalid traffic
Also called IVT, Bot traffic, Ad fraud.
Clicks and impressions that did not come from a real person acting on the ad — bots, prefetchers, repeat automation, and traffic from somewhere other than the booked property.
General invalid traffic is the mechanical kind: crawlers, link previewers, security scanners, browser prefetch. Sophisticated invalid traffic is deliberate — bought traffic, click farms, and inventory laundering where an ad booked on one site is actually served on another.
The unglamorous filter catches most of it: a known-bot user agent, an impossible click interval, or a referer that does not match the property the ad was booked on. That last one is the important one and the one most often skipped, because it catches the laundering case that user-agent filtering never will.
Filtering is in the honest publisher's interest, not against it. A publisher whose numbers survive filtering can prove their audience; one whose numbers collapse was selling something else.
How LinkBourse handles it
Every event is filtered at write time, and the referer is compared to the booked property — traffic from a lookalike domain or a farm is excluded from the counts that release money, not merely flagged for later.
How we verify propertiesTerms it depends on
- Impression
- One instance of an ad being served — not necessarily seen, and not necessarily by a person.
- Click-through rate
- Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage.
- CPC
- A price paid per click rather than per view, shifting delivery risk to the publisher.