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Welcome to I/O Labs
I/O Labs is a search engine that proactively spiders the web without needing to know which sites are publishers or referrer data. The end result is being able to see interesting things like cookies that were set and JavaScript objects that were used across the entire web.
Click fraud doesn't need to be a "cost of doing business".
The industry numbers
Digital ad spend [1]
worldwide: $0B
display: $0B
Programmatic ad spend [1]
worldwide: $0B
fraud: $0B
Fraud represents up to
0
of clicks [5]
Who watches the watchers?
Affiliate networks are in an interesting situation; part of the service they offer is to prevent fraud. However, they get paid based on how much is paid out to affiliates (including fraud). The short version is this: they make more money if they don't stop affiliate fraud.Potential bad actors on networks
affiliate networks benefit from cookie-stuffing [6] Ben Edelman
To date, affiliate networks have failed to aggressively pursue, stop, and punish those affiliates using cookie-stuffing. [6] Ben Edelman
LinkShare has repeatedly granted a $15,000 award to affiliates later found to be using cookie-stuffing [6] Ben Edelman
Loss to affiliate fraud: $3.4 billion per year
How we can help
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See which sites are causing any cookie to be set without human interaction. This could be from cookie stuffing, typo-squatting or other methods that violate affiliate program's terms of service. No need to rely on easily hidden referrer data.Example: Commission Junction wants to see publishers that are potentially cookie stuffing.
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With our click analytics, you are able to see clicks happening within your network/program in real-time, giving you the ability to visually see anomalies that might warrant investigation as they happen.Sample analytics data is available for viewing.
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Find websites using certain technology based on cookies and/or JavaScript objects.Example: you are a competitor to LiveChat and interested in which websites have their chat widget installed.
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If you license commercial software that is installed on public web servers, you can see which websites have a JavaScript object or cookie that is specific to your software.Example: you can see which sites have the vBulletin JavaScript object.
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Get alerts in real-time (via push notifications, Telegram and/or Slack) anytime our spider sees a specific cookie being set or JavaScript object being initialized.Alerts can be defined under alert cookies or alert JavaScript.
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You can control the spider in real-time and instruct it to spider any URL instantly and return the results.Spider a specific URL.
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The history of cookies and JavaScript is available since the spider was started. This allows you to see things happening today as well as the past.
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Any time an alert is triggered, the full initiator backtrace of that spidering session is saved for up to 6 months in case you want to go digging to understand how something happened. You can share your logs with others as well as download them in raw form.A sample backtrace log is available here.
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For Enterprise users, there is an API that allows you to query data and control the spider.
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When querying for cookies, you can choose to only return cookies that include a specific string in it's value.Maybe you are interested in the eBay cookie, npii, but only if it contains the string tpim.
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Cookie name wildcards allow you to consolidate different cookies based on their prefix.Rakuten tracks affiliate clicks with a unique cookie for each managed affiliate program.
Citations
- eMarketer: The Size of the Ad Fraud Problem in Digital Marketing Is Varying
- TrueList: 21 Astonishing Affiliate Marketing Statistics
- University of Baltimore: Digital Advertising Ecosystem is Rife with Fraud
- Oxford University: Characterizing fraud and its ramifications in affiliate marketing networks
- eMarketer: Click Fraud: How Real Is the Threat?
- Ben Edelman: Cookie-Stuffing Targeting Major Affiliate Merchants
- destinationCRM: Affiliate Marketing to Be a $36.9 Billion Market by 2030
- Statista: Affiliate marketing spending in the United States from 2010 to 2022
- PR Newswire: Affiliate marketing fraud now a $3.4 Billion problem
Spidering since 2013
| unique | total | |
| cookies | 1.2B | 14.1B |
| head | 55.2M | 1.6B |
| hosts | 309.5M | 2.3B |
| js | 1.7B | 16.7B |