1. There's a link a comment up in the thread[1] that points out Ghost Sites: Websites with high visitor traffic but obviously no one would ever really visit. Like Babypowder.net or some such malarkey. If you're running a ghost site, you contract out to a botnet to deliver clicks and impressions at rate lower than the return from the advertising.
2. The article shows a bunch of these ghost sites so I would suspect that it's common in the world of scamming/ghost sites to drive up their CPM (Cost per Thousand). Hell, if I was running a legit site, I'd outsource the bullshit ghost sites to a Russian company so that my own CPM gets higher. As an example: I bet the value of "Baby Powder" as a search term is probably twice what it should be.
3. Get "Live HTTP Headers" or run your traffic through a proxy and see how many HTTP requests you generate just using a basic ad. I worked in Rich-Media Advertising and the way we tracked was every interaction. Right when I left in 2008-2009 we started tracking more and more. Really depended what the client bought/paid for. But we'd always track opens, clicks, etc.. the basic stuff. We didn't do heatmaps or X,Y coordinate tracking, but we had the data.
It was impressive to see, we would host our units on Akamai and due to the sheer traffic were unable to do real-time SQL inserts, so we would crunch the HTTP logs in hour increments after the fact to generate the data. So a typical GET string would be ad.domain.tld/?id=adunitMD5&type=Click&x=0&y=0&action=MD5
Of course it wouldn't be that verbose, but the GET string would be quite long with all the data. This was all done through a combo of JS and ActionScript.
Comments
1. There's a link a comment up in the thread[1] that points out Ghost Sites: Websites with high visitor traffic but obviously no one would ever really visit. Like Babypowder.net or some such malarkey. If you're running a ghost site, you contract out to a botnet to deliver clicks and impressions at rate lower than the return from the advertising.
2. The article shows a bunch of these ghost sites so I would suspect that it's common in the world of scamming/ghost sites to drive up their CPM (Cost per Thousand). Hell, if I was running a legit site, I'd outsource the bullshit ghost sites to a Russian company so that my own CPM gets higher. As an example: I bet the value of "Baby Powder" as a search term is probably twice what it should be.
3. Get "Live HTTP Headers" or run your traffic through a proxy and see how many HTTP requests you generate just using a basic ad. I worked in Rich-Media Advertising and the way we tracked was every interaction. Right when I left in 2008-2009 we started tracking more and more. Really depended what the client bought/paid for. But we'd always track opens, clicks, etc.. the basic stuff. We didn't do heatmaps or X,Y coordinate tracking, but we had the data.
It was impressive to see, we would host our units on Akamai and due to the sheer traffic were unable to do real-time SQL inserts, so we would crunch the HTTP logs in hour increments after the fact to generate the data. So a typical GET string would be ad.domain.tld/?id=adunitMD5&type=Click&x=0&y=0&action=MD5
Of course it wouldn't be that verbose, but the GET string would be quite long with all the data. This was all done through a combo of JS and ActionScript.
[1] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/meet-most-suspect-publ...