Why is my click count lower now?
Before we acquired the site, there was very rudimentary Bot Click filtering (BCF) and Click Fraud Detection (CFD). Most bot clicks and fraudulent clicks were counted and charged to advertisers. It was driving away advertisers. We all know, without advertisers, there is no money to be made by anyone.
We understand perfectly that for us to be a viable platform, we have to watch out for the interest of both the advertisers and publishers. Without strict click fraud detection and bot click filtering, advertisers will leave and there is no money to be made by anyone. On the other hand, if we did not honor valid clicks generated by honest publishers, they will leave and there is no one to post ads for the advertisers. We are strict on click fraud to deliver value to advertisers, and at the same time, we make sure every valid click is counted so both publishers and us can earn some money. And we pay promptly publishers who earn their money without committing click fraud.
Three things affect the click counts on a RevTwt ad you post:
1. Most of the ads are country targeted. Clicks from outside the target countries are not counted.
2. We only count multiple clicks from same IP or PC once. If CFD is triggered, then all clicks will be audited and if click fraud is found, none of the clicks will count and the account is banned permanently.
3. Many of the clicks on a RevTwt ad on any links you post on Twitter are bot clicks, for example, Twitturl.com and many other bots crawl links in Twitter, trying to rank them or index them. These bot generates tens of thousands of clicks on our ads and obviously, they cannot counted. Below is an example of clicks generated by a Twitter account on 4/29/2009. Out of 17 clicks, there were only 5 valid clicks. To see whether a click is a bot click, look at the URL it is from (typically it is blank or a known bot site like twitturl.com) and the user agent (the last one), among other things. Bot clicks are just crawlers/indexers that are trying to index the links on Twitter, they are not real humans looking at the pages.
valid click 106184 28078 4287 68.80.6.201 http://twitter.com/home 4/29/2009 13:28:27 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; GTB6; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0
bot click 106168 28078 4287 128.121.156.55 http://powertwitter.me/ 4/29/2009 13:27:42 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
valid click 106163 28078 4287 76.229.228.106 http://twitter.com/home 4/29/2009 13:27:31 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10
bot click 103760 27368 4287 128.121.156.52 http://powertwitter.me/ 4/29/2009 9:54:08 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
valid click 103725 27246 4287 64.185.60.6 http://twitter.com/home 4/29/2009 9:49:51 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.53 Safari/525.19
bot click 103445 27260 4287 74.125.75.1 http://rtweetme.appspot.com/ 4/29/2009 9:32:49 AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine)
bot click 103264 27260 4287 67.202.32.158 4/29/2009 9:16:20 Twitturly / v0.6
bot click 103228 27260 4287 74.126.19.26 http://twitturls.com/ 4/29/2009 9:13:02 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com)
bot click 103223 27260 4287 67.202.28.213 4/29/2009 9:12:54 AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com)
bot click 103185 26351 4287 67.202.32.158 4/29/2009 9:09:53 Twitturly / v0.6
valid click 103173 27246 4287 96.240.51.179 http://twitter.com/mjmoreland 4/29/2009 9:08:49 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
valid click 101298 26351 4287 70.217.175.208 http://twitter.com/money4joe 4/29/2009 6:31:06 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)
valid click 100611 26351 4287 66.185.42.46 http://twitter.com/money4joe 4/29/2009 5:27:09 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; WOW64; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; 3P_USEC 1.0.10.8; 3P_UVRM 1.0.
bot click 100326 26351 4287 67.202.28.213 4/29/2009 4:52:06 AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com)
bot click 100323 26351 4287 74.126.19.26 http://twitturls.com/ 4/29/2009 4:51:33 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com)
bot click 100230 26327 4287 75.101.202.83 4/29/2009 4:40:53 Twitturly / v0.6
bot click 100225 26327 4287 67.202.28.213 4/29/2009 4:40:10 AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com)
bot click 100216 26323 4287 174.129.171.213 4/29/2009 4:38:33 Twitturly / v0.6
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