AdPlugg Takes on Bot Traffic with New Bot Filtering Technology
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) November 18, 2016 -- AdPlugg’s new bot filtering tools dramatically increase the accuracy of online ad statistics. This week, online ad service, AdPlugg, launched a new suite of bot filtering and blacklisting tools designed to combat the influx of false traffic penetrating ad statistics across the internet. The tools allow AdPlugg to provide publishers and advertisers with more accurate statistics regarding the number of human impressions and clicks that each ad receives.
AdPlugg is an online ad server and ad manager system that is in use by more than 10,000 publishers across the internet. Both publishers and advertisers rely on AdPlugg to serve and manage their ads. As ads are served, AdPlugg tracks and reports on exactly how many impressions and clicks each ad receives. These statistics are then used for billing and performance measurement purposes.
While most web traffic comes from human users, a growing proportion is now generated by “bots.” A bot, short for “robot,” is an automated program that browses the web.
Bots come in many different forms and have many different purposes. Most bot traffic is from crawler bots. Crawler bots, also sometimes called “spiders,” are used by search engines such as Google Search and Microsoft Bing to find and index web content for use in their search results. Other bots are not as well intentioned. A growing number of email harvesters, spambots, malware, and bots that scan for security vulnerabilities, are roaming the web.
No matter if the bot has a legitimate, innocuous purpose or is of the malicious variety, its browsing activity can only serve to skew online advertising result statistics. Advertisers are only interested in the number of human impressions and clicks that an ad receives. There is quite clearly no purpose in marketing to bots.
With bot traffic increasing, systems such as AdPlugg are becoming more involved in identifying and weeding the bot traffic out of the statistics for an ad. This can be a difficult task, however. Standards, such as the Robots Excusion Standard have emerged to allow publishers and bot developers to work together to allow bots to crawl a site while keeping the bot from overstepping its boundaries. Support for the standards, even amongst the biggest web companies, is however still limited.
While some bots do follow the standards, malicious bots have little interest in cooperating. It has even become common for malicious bots to intentionally search standards compliant sites and to use the standards against them. For instance, one standard allows a site to list parts of the site that shouldn’t be crawled by bots. Malicious bots are known to read the list and to use it as a road map for where to attack first.
The key to combating the bots, for online advertising purposes, is less of an issue of stopping them and more of an issue of identifying them. AdPlugg’s new bot filtering technology allows the service to identify and filter traffic from more than 400 different bots. AdPlugg also has systems in place to regularly identify new bots and filter them as well.
AdPlugg CEO Collin Krawll remarked, “With these new systems, we hope to be able to increase the efficacy and accuracy of online advertising.”
The battle against bots is sure to be an ongoing one, whose complexity will only increase with time. AdPlugg’s new systems are a major advancement for the businesses that rely on online advertising as a part of their overall sales and marketing strategies.
About AdPlugg
AdPlugg offers an easy-to-use ad platform that allows web based publishers and advertisers to build their businesses through online advertising. The AdPlugg advertising plugin installs instantly into any website. Once installed, the site owner can easily serve ads throughout their site using the controls available from adplugg.com. AdPlugg’s analytical tools provide publishers and advertisers with statistics regarding each ad’s performance.
To learn more about AdPlugg, visit http://www.adplugg.com.
Director of Public Relations, AdPlugg, http://www.adplugg.com, +1 (415) 212-8796, [email protected]
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