Methodology & technology

Methodology

Rather than spidering just publisher sites looking for fraud, we take a more complete approach where we spider the entire web looking for cookie stuffing/click fraud. It gives us a more complete view of click fraud happening without needing to rely on knowing the websites of the publishers.

In addition to logging every cookie we encounter, we also log every JavaScript object that we see. Between cookies and JavaScript objects used, we can detect a myriad of technologies in-use by the website. An example of this would be if you wanted to know which sites use vBulletin bulletin board software (maybe you are a competitor looking to generate leads or you are the developers looking for sites using pirated versions).

We are able to do all this without the reliance on referrer data that is increasingly obfuscated by default as modern web browsers become more privacy focused (referrer data is also easily hidden completely by fraudsters). If an affiliate program can't see where a click originated, it's impossible to check the source to see if there's cookie stuffing happening. Again, we do not need to rely on referrer data since we are spidering the entire web proactively.

Technology

The underlying spider that we developed is built with a custom verison of the Chrome rendering engine (it's kept up to date with the latest versions of Chrome as they are released). What that means is that any cookie stuffing or click fraud that is possible with an end-user using Chrome, is fraud we are able to detect.

Analytics

The click analytics we offer allows you to see affiliate or ad clicks coming across your network in realtime. The analytics system is mutually exclusive from the spider and fraud detection systems (one is not required to be used in order to use the other).

Click analytics are decoupled from needing servers in order to route the user that made the click (it doesn't rely on our servers or any other servers for the user to end up at the correct location). This removes your reliance on our servers needing to be available and online for your users to be redirected properly. We use Cloudflare Workers for click logging and redirection which puts the network connection and code in the edge (not on a server) in Cloudflare's 285+ data centers around the world. Additionally, redirecting a user to their destination is decoupled from the analytics logging mechanism (the user is redirected to their destination before logging is even attempted). 99% of the world's population is within a few milliseconds of a Cloudflare data center.