Click fraud detection

Who

I/O Labs has the ability to see every cookie being set by a site it spiders. The spider does not "click" anything when rendering the site, so if it sees a cookie that should only be set when a user clicks an affiliate link or an advertisement, it can be inferred that something on that site is forcing users to click something without interaction.
We can see anything that caused a cookie to be set (including cookie-stuffing via pop-ups/pop-unders, redirection, iframes, JavaScript, CSS, Images, typosquatting, etc.)
Modern browsers are increasingly more privacy focused and by default, no longer include the full referrer URL (instead only giving the domain). It's also simple for fraudsters to instruct the browsers of users being cookie-stuffed to not give even the referring domain (instead giving nothing). Affiliate programs and ad networks become blind for compliance checking since they don't know where the "click" originated. By spidering specific sites and then looking at the results, we are able to proactively detect click-fraud without the reliance on referrer data.
If we assume an affiliate program or ad network doesn't want fraudsters in their program, knowing who is committing fraud leads to direct cost savings because you no longer need to pay for the fraud.
Affiliate fraud averages a little above 20% across all industries, so if your affiliate program has an average amount of fraud, an affiliate program paying $250/month for a fraud detection service typically will save money if they are paying out a total of $1,250 in affiliate commissions per month (since they no longer need to pay on the fraud).
Use this tool to check if we've seen any cookie being set, no account required.

How

If you are managing a handful of affiliate programs and/or want to know more about how the clicks are being forced, the Pro-level service allows you to track fraud across multiple affiliate programs, see HTTP header logs from the spidering and spider deep URLs on demand for compliance checking.

Enterprise

For the largest customers, our Enterprise-level service allows you to monitor an infinite number of affiliate programs, review full backtraces from spidering logs (allows you to see things like which line of a JavaScript file triggered something like a ad click), have access to our API so that you can programatically query or control the spider for real-time compliance workflow.

Spidering since 2013

  unique total
cookies 1.1B 13.2B
head 30.8M 281.6M
hosts 240.0M 529.7M
js 1.6B 14.7B

Firehose

Cookie domains found

JavaScript objects found

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