Overview

Exchange partners and publishers will often assess ad quality by using validation tools to scan creatives and the corresponding websites to which those creatives point. Those validation tools reuse actual ad markup from live impressions for their scans, which will cause “test” clicks to occur on actual impressions.

Corresponding behaviors you can expect to see are:

Traffic to websites that come from unexpected IP addresses or user IDs, which do not match any IP addresses or user IDs in Beeswax win logs
IP addresses and user IDs on clicks that do not match IP addresses and user IDs from the corresponding impressions as seen in the ip_address and clicks_ip_address field of the win-logs
A spike in clicks at the beginning of a campaign using a new creative that then trails off a few days into the campaign

Beeswax does not count any click in reporting that is known to the best of our ability to be from a validation tool. Unfortunately, there is no way to perfectly identify every kind of validation tool that may be clicking on ads.

Due to the nature of creative validation tools and their intent to identify malicious advertising, the methodology by which we identify suspected tools can often change and cannot be disclosed. If you have any additional questions, please contact Beeswax Support.

Table of Contents

Overview