Invalid traffic can be blocked before it ever reaches an advertiser or upstream partner, increasing confidence and customer satisfaction and decreasing the need for credits or refunds. Block lists should be used at the impression level to ensure ads aren't served to visitors with known fraudulent click behaviors. By filtering these visitors invalid clicks and impressions can be significantly reduced. Continual improvements in blocking bad visitors can impact reputation and quality scores with major ad providers. Higher scores result in higher commissions from many CPC ad providers.

1. Community block list - derived from the massive Click Forensics community data set, the community block list includes known offenders identified across the entire Click Forensics network. It includes IP addresses of known fraud perpetrators as well as the IP addresses and UserAgent strings for such sources of invalid traffic as colocation facilities, crawlers, and bots, both malicious and benign.
2. Client-specific block list - the community block list is augmented by processing client traffic and including IP addresses of visitors found to be committing click fraud or IP's generating invalid traffic specific to Client campaigns. The effectiveness of the community block list is increased by 100% by adding client-specific traffic patterns.

Real Time Updates:

Client-specific campaigns. IP addresses that have been identified as generating invalid traffic are added to the client specific block list immediately so as to minimize the impact of an attack. Also known as the Visitor Block List, this list of offending IP addresses can be downloaded many times per hour, or as frequently as required.

Daily updates:

Known offenders. IP addresses that have been proven to commit a high level of fraud based on the CFI community data set. Includes publishers found to commit fraud via collusion techniques. List structure: IP addresses

Monthly updates:

Colocation facilities. Servers at collocation facilities that have no known human traffic origination. These servers are often used by fraudsters to generate click fraud and e-mail spam.
List structure: IP address ranges
Known Bots. Comprehensive list of UserAgents used by spiders and crawlers. Contains far more entries and produces fewer false negatives and false positives than other industry bot lists (e.g., IAB Bot List).
List structure: UserAgent strings
Ad Providers. List of IPs that are owned by ad providers used to crawl sites, click on links, and test ad campaigns. Some are IPs used by humans; some are bots that do not identify themselves.
List structure: UserAgent strings and IP address ranges
Block lists and updates are included with the Click Forensics for Ad Networks & Publishers service for no additional fee. Block lists can be purchased separately, see Schedule B for pricing.