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Reliability of the Figures

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Reliability of the Figures

The press have recently covered hot topic of click fraud and counting discrepancies extensively – it’s an advertisers nightmare! As ad server provider we take these issues very seriously. It’s our responsibility to make sure click fraud doesn’t happen so that clients have confidence and trust in us.

Media enterprises have always haggled over their audience figures and television stations have no way of proving how many people watch their programmes. Print media juggle around their print runs. The Internet by contrast offers far more specific figures on supplied banners, clicks and duration of stay. But this especially is a source of lively debate.

Publishers, media agencies, advertisers and adserving providers; while all of them track adserving, they invariably come up with different results. This is completely normal and stems from a number of causes including pop-up blockers, sluggish servers, incorrectly programmed advertising media. What aggrieves the industry more though are the high counting discrepancies. Deviations of below five per cent are regarded as exemplary. Figures in the higher single-digit range are also accepted. However, discrepancies in excess of ten per cent necessitate close examination.

The best way to reduce discrepancies is to employ standardised counting methods. ADTECH have acknowledged the problem in the industry to the extent of having developed a specific adserving function in our technology that enables us to analyse any suspicious data. It’s a quick a robust method of viewing the data to confirm or deny any potential click fraud. It’s a function every publisher/advertiser should be asking for when looking for a trustworthy solution. The IAB has defined globally applicable measurement guidelines in collaboration with ADTECH. Their implementation will ensure reliable values when recording ad impressions.

These measurement guidelines recommend the following measures:

Cache busting
Temporary saving of advertising media, which have already been saved to the browser or proxy cache, could give rise to counting discrepancies. ADTECH uses a variety of techniques to avoid this, the most common being to add a random number to each adrequest or, in the case of ADTECH, a timestamp. Here the browser requests the advertising media again from the adserver whenever the page is loaded rather than retrieving it from the cache.

Filtering
Page views by software programmes such as robots, spiders or Web crawlers (non-human activities) may force up the number of adrequests artificially. ADTECH filters out these impressions on the basis of blacklists and robot lists issued by the IAB, meaning that they are not included in the report. This also applies to bad requests that are only partially received by the adserver.

Viewcount
Unlike reporting ad impressions, viewcount logs users’ adviews. The procedure gauges whether a banner was successfully displayed in the browser.

The described resources are aimed at reducing counting discrepancies, although they will never be able to eliminate them completely. Occasional differences in figures will occur owing to comparing apples with pears as it were. In order to clarify such discrepancies ADTECH’s customer service makes use of detailed troubleshooting. In this regard, it is easiest to verify whether:
- the reporting periods are identical
- the number of placings contained in the reports to be compared tally
- only one or several campaigns are running on a single placing

Where redirects are concerned, the client service managers review the reporting data from all involved adserver systems. A breakdown accurate down to the hour helps to trace adserving irregularities. Comparison of counting methods can also reveal the causes of errors.
If the campaign is still underway, client service also employs debuggers in troubleshooting on the booked webpage. Tools like this analyse the source of the browser’s content incl. the banners and the duration of the requests.

Certification and standardisation are the best way of avoiding excessively high counting discrepancies and the subsequent search for causes. ADTECH is taking the lead with its IAB certificate. The seal of quality, which is reviewed annually, confirms the highest degree of transparency and precision when it comes to ADTECH’s ad serving and reporting of display ads via the adservers. ADTECH’s stance on this standardisation drive is absolutely clear: “Any kind of standardisation will serve to increase our industry’s credibility,” sums up CEO Dirk Freytag. “That can only be to our benefit.”

More information:
Please send an e-mail to or call our office in London at +44 20 7291-4900. To reach out to our team in Scandinavia, please e-mail to or call them at +46 707-776751.

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