Ad Analytics & Fraud Prevention
Edgemesh® Server's AdFraud Analysis and Protection System is designed to tackle the significant issue of ad fraud by effectively identifying and preventing fraudulent automated traffic, particularly paid traffic, thereby reducing wasted advertising spend.
Ad fraud, also known as invalid traffic (IVT), involves fraudulent practices that misrepresent online ad impressions, clicks, traffic, conversions, or data with the intention of generating revenue. It is a pervasive problem in the digital advertising industry, with substantial financial implications. In fact, in 2016, ad fraud accounted for an estimated loss of $7.2 billion globally, where approximately $1 out of every $3 spent on digital ads was lost to ad fraud.
Ad fraud primarily stems from two sources: automated clicking of ad links using "bots" and human-based repetitive clicks on ad links. Regardless of the source, the impact is the same. When a user clicks an ad link, it triggers a charge from the ad provider, as most ad platforms operate on a pay-per-click model. Importantly, this charge is incurred irrespective of whether the customer actually views the website or engages with the content. Once the link is clicked, the cost is already incurred, rendering attempts to block bots from accessing the page ineffective in preventing wasted ad spend.
Edgemesh® Server's AdFraud Analysis and Protection System goes beyond traditional measures by implementing advanced mechanisms to identify and prevent ad fraud at its root. By accurately analyzing and detecting fraudulent traffic, our system ensures that paid advertising budgets are maximized and not squandered on fraudulent clicks. This protection mechanism significantly reduces the impact of ad fraud, providing a valuable safeguard for businesses seeking to optimize their advertising investments and achieve genuine engagement with their target audience.
Bot Detection
Recognizing the significance of distinguishing between automated bot traffic and genuine user traffic, Edgemesh® Server places great importance on providing accurate bot detection capabilities. To achieve this, we have seamlessly integrated renowned bot-detection systems, including the industry-acclaimed Cloudflare Bot Management system, into every page request. Importantly, this integration is designed to have zero performance impact on the overall page load time, ensuring a smooth and seamless user experience.
It is crucial to acknowledge that not all bots are inherently malicious. Bots such as the GoogleBot play a pivotal role in driving organic traffic and indexing web content, which is essential for businesses. Edgemesh® Server effectively differentiates between verified bots, often referred to as "good bots," and malicious bots, known as "bad bots." This intelligent distinction ensures that legitimate crawlers and beneficial automated processes continue to function seamlessly while actively preventing harmful or fraudulent bot activities.
By leveraging advanced bot-detection mechanisms, Edgemesh® Server provides a comprehensive and robust solution for accurately identifying and managing bot traffic. This capability not only safeguards businesses against malicious bots that can skew analytics and generate fraudulent ad clicks but also ensures that legitimate bots can continue to fulfill their valuable roles without disruption. Ultimately, this comprehensive approach to bot management empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, maintain the integrity of their analytics, and optimize their online performance and advertising investments.
Bot Tagging
Introducing BTAG - a revolutionary approach to bot protection, brought to you by Edgemesh®.
Traditionally, blocking bots has posed the risk of inadvertently blocking legitimate user traffic. Moreover, in terms of ad fraud prevention, simply blocking the bot does not impact your advertising expenses. Recognizing these challenges, we have developed a game-changing solution called BTAG as the cornerstone of our Ad Fraud Analysis and Protection System.
So, how does BTAG work? Rather than blocking bots, BTAG leverages bot information to seamlessly redirect bot requests to a dedicated pathname known as /em-cgi/btag. This approach ensures that the originator of the request receives the requested page, but on an identifiable pathname specifically designed for bot tagging.
The true power of BTAG lies in its ability to enable comprehensive data collection for every marketing tag enabled on your site. This means that every ad platform you currently use will gather valuable information about users visiting the BTAG version of your site. By aggregating this data, you gain a powerful tool for identifying and excluding bad actors from future targeting—a capability we refer to as de-targeting.
With BTAG, you can directly observe the impact of these tagged requests in Google Analytics using a dedicated segment. This segment allows you to analyze the subset of users originating from bots across every view, including their acquisition channels. It provides invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and the influence of bot traffic on your marketing efforts.
To learn more about Edgemesh®'s innovative AdFraud protection and gain deeper insights into BTAG, we invite you to explore our comprehensive blog post, which dives into the details of how we are combating ad fraud with Edgemesh® Server.
BTAG revolutionizes the approach to bot protection by embracing data collection, de-targeting capabilities, and seamless integration with existing marketing tags. With Edgemesh® and BTAG, you can confidently safeguard your ad investments, optimize your marketing strategies, and make informed decisions based on accurate analytics.
Edge Security
At Edgemesh®, we prioritize the security of our customers' websites and applications. Our partnership with leading infrastructure providers like Cloudflare and Fastly allows us to offer robust security features as part of Edgemesh® Server.
With our integrated infrastructure, we provide a powerful firewall, web application protection, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection that operates around the clock, 365 days a year. This means your website is safeguarded against emerging threats and malicious activities in real-time. We take care of updating security rules and implementing necessary measures so that you can focus on your core business.
Our security system actively blocks or challenges over 1 million suspicious requests each day, protecting your website from nefarious regions, bots, and scrapers. We ensure that your visitors can access your site securely and seamlessly, while potential threats are kept at bay. Furthermore, we offer customization options for security settings, allowing you to tailor the protection to your specific needs. This gives you complete control over who can access your site and how they interact with it.
In our commitment to empowering our customers, we are continually enhancing our services. In the future, we plan to provide direct access to these security customizations through our user-friendly Edgemesh® Portal. This will further streamline your ability to manage and fine-tune the security of your website, putting the control in your hands.
With Edgemesh® Server, you can have peace of mind knowing that your website is backed by a robust security infrastructure, proactive threat detection, and customizable protection measures. We are dedicated to keeping your digital assets safe, so you can focus on delivering exceptional experiences to your visitors.
Analytics and Statistics
At Edgemesh®, we understand the importance of data and analytics in making informed decisions for your website. That's why we provide comprehensive data aggregation and reporting through the Edgemesh® Portal.
With our Ad Fraud Analytics, you gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and the impact of ad fraud on your advertising budget. We aggregate and analyze data related to bot traffic, click fraud, and invalid traffic to help you identify potential fraudulent activities and optimize your ad spend. Our intuitive dashboard and visualizations make it easy to monitor and evaluate the performance of your ads.
In addition, we offer Crawler Stats, which provide detailed information about the crawlers and bots accessing your website. You can track their activities, including the frequency of requests, the pages they visit, and their impact on your server resources. This data helps you understand how search engines and other bots interact with your site, allowing you to optimize your content and ensure a smooth crawling experience.
To further support your data-driven decision-making, we provide access to raw data through our API. This allows you to integrate Edgemesh® data into your own analytics tools or systems, enabling deeper analysis and custom reporting tailored to your specific needs.
By leveraging the data and insights available in the Edgemesh® Portal and through our API, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your website's performance, ad fraud landscape, and crawler behavior. This empowers you to make informed decisions, optimize your strategies, and enhance the overall efficiency and security of your online presence.
Ad Fraud Analytics
With Ad Fraud Analytics, you can track the performance of your ad campaigns and assess the extent of ad fraud impacting your advertising budget. The analytics provide valuable insights into the sources of clicks, allowing you to identify any patterns or discrepancies that may indicate fraudulent activity.
To assist in recovering fraudulent ad spend, we offer the option to export the data into a report. This report can then be used to engage with the respective ad networks to address the issue and seek reimbursement for the fraudulent clicks. This manual process can help recover wasted ad spend and mitigate the impact of ad fraud on your advertising budget.
Our dedicated Engineering team at Edgemesh® is continuously working to enhance our Ad Fraud Protection capabilities. Our goal is to automate this process in future iterations, making it even more seamless and efficient for you to identify and recover fraudulent ad spend with ad networks. This ongoing development demonstrates our commitment to staying ahead of evolving ad fraud techniques and providing robust solutions to protect your advertising investments.
Crawler Statistics
Understanding how search engines crawl and index your website is essential for effective SEO strategy, and at Edgemesh®, we provide you with valuable insights through our Crawler Statistics feature. Crawler Statistics give you visibility into how and when search engines (verified bots) are accessing and indexing your website.
By analyzing the data provided in Crawler Statistics, you can gain valuable insights into the behavior of search engine crawlers. You can identify patterns, such as the frequency and timing of crawls, and assess the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. This information helps you evaluate the impact of changes to your website or SEO strategy on the indexing rates of search engines.
With Crawler Statistics, you can proactively identify any issues that may be hindering search engine crawlers from effectively indexing your content. By understanding how search engines interact with your website, you can make informed decisions to optimize your website structure, content, and meta tags, ensuring better visibility in search engine results.
The insights provided by Crawler Statistics empower you to refine your SEO strategy, improve your website's indexing rates, and enhance your overall search engine visibility. With Edgemesh®'s comprehensive crawler data, you can confidently make data-driven decisions to boost your website's performance in search engine rankings.
Stay ahead of the competition and maximize your website's SEO potential with Edgemesh® Crawler Statistics. Gain valuable insights and optimize your SEO strategy to increase your website's visibility and attract organic traffic from search engines.
