Detection of Fraudulent Traffic

How does Liveclicker detect fraudulent traffic to my campaigns?

Liveclicker has solutions in place to prevent and detect fraudulent requests against our servers for customer campaigns:

Our firewalls prevent basic denial-of-service attacks (SYN floods and DDoS attacks).

Additional firewall protection detects too many requests from the same location (IP address) in a short period of time. These requests will either be blocked automatically, or will trigger a notification to our IT team about the suspicious traffic.

However, in general it is very difficult to detect and prevent spoofing by sophisticated individuals. One way to make this spoofing more easily detectable is to use the "Subscriber ID" ESP custom field in your campaigns. That way, every impression will be marked with the user who opened it. A large number of impressions from the same subscriber, or illegal subscriber ID values, is an indication of suspicious or spoofed traffic.

Finally, all of the data used as the basis for billable credits is available in our analytics. Odd patterns of analytics information (such as 50% of the traffic coming from Opera browsers, for example) can also be used to detect spoofing.

If you believe some traffic in your campaigns is fraudulent, contact Liveclicker Support and our team will attempt to validate the traffic.