Click Fraud Blog
Baselining to Protect Your Campaigns
December 17th, 2007
Over a number of posts I am going to discuss the topic of baselining and how it can help to protect your campaigns from Click Fraud
What is Baselining
wikipedia describes baselining as
Baselining is a method for analyzing computer network performance. The method is marked by comparing current performance to a historical metric, or “baseline”. For example, if you measured the performance of a network switch over a period of time, you could use that performance figure as a comparative baseline if you made a configuration change to the switch.
I like to think of it as trending your normal traffic levels. In a click fraud context, if your metrics begin to exceed your baseline in any significant way, it is an indication that all is not well.
Metrics Available
Your web server software will collect a large number of metrics about your visitors behaviour. These include the source IP address of the visitor, the type of browser or user agent they are visting from, time of visit, whether cookies are enabled. The list is quite long. For a full list of the metrics available to you, please review your own log files.
What you should baseline to protect against click fraud
I will detail how to baseline the metrics in details in individual posts, but in summary, I like to baseline
- Bounce Rate
- Click Through Rate
- Time on Site
- Source Country
- Depth of Visit
- Conversion Rate
Google Analytics
The next few posts will be fairly interactive, and I will detail how to baseline the various metrics using Google Analytics. This is a free Analytic tool, whilst I think it has it’s flaws as a click fraud detection tool (I will detail this in the last post in this series), it is freely available and very easy to use. If you would like to work through the posts, please have analytics installed and collecting data in preparation.
In the next post I will dicuss bounce rate.
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Tags: Click Fraud
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