TIP OF THE MONTH


Monitoring Publisher Activity with the IP Report

An unusually high level of activity from a Publisher may be an indication that the Publisher is artificially inflating its click-through rates to obtain higher commissions from you. The IP Report lets you examine this activity in greater detail.

Note: You can arrange to have email notices automatically sent to you when your Publishers exhibit unusual activity. Contact your LinkShare representative for further information.

How to Run an IP Report
Follow these steps to run an IP Report on a selected Publisher:

  1. In the Account area of the Navigation Panel (the first page you see when you log in), click "IP Report" (or select "IP Report" from the Account drop-down menu from anywhere in the interface).
  2. Enter the SID (site identification) number for the Publisher on which you want to run the report. You can obtain the SID number in a Sales and Activity Report, or by viewing transactions.
  3. Enter the date range during which the activity occurred.
    Note: Due to volume, please note that this report can only be run for click-throughs in the previous month and the current month.
  4. Click the Go button.
This generates three separate reports for this Publisher. You can view these reports on the screen, or you can click the appropriate links under each of them to download them to your computer for later reference. The files will be downloaded inside zip files. To read them, first open the zip files with WinZip® or another archive utility, and then open the files inside with Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet program.

Here is a description of each report:
Note: "Count" refers to the number of click-throughs.

IP Report
This report lists the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of all of the computers that have clicked through on the link. If you click on the IP address in this report, you can drill down to the date, user name (generated by LinkShare from a cookie on the user's computer), and referring URL. In the case of invalid activity, you may notice a significant number of entries for the same user name and/or the same URL within a short period of time.

Note: Some ISPs use a range of dynamic IP addresses across their users, so two clicks from the same IP address may not be the same person. Public computers, such as those in libraries, may also cause more than one person to appear at the same IP address.

Username Report
 This report lists all of the unique locations from which a click was generated in the given time period. LinkShare sets a cookie on the browser of a computer during a click-through. In the cookie, LinkShare assigns a numeric string of eight or nine numbers that identifies the browser and click-through. Therefore, if you notice a significant amount of click-throughs for one particular user name for a short period of time, this could be a sign of invalid activity. Click the user name to see the computer's IP address.

Note: Some ISPs use a range of dynamic IP addresses across their users, so two clicks from the same IP address may not be the same person. Public computers, such as those in libraries, may also cause more than one person to appear at the same IP address.

Referral URL Report
 This report lists all of the Web pages that referred a particular user to your site. These are typically the pages where you will find a link to your site. Click the Web address to link to the referring site. If "Direct Request" is listed instead of a URL, it indicates that the click did not originate from a Web page (for instance, it came from an email). TIP: Use the Referral URL Report to profile sites that are sending you click-throughs. For instance, you might run a Sales and Activity Report to get the ID numbers of your top 10 sites, run IP Reports from those Publishers, and click on the Referral URLs to see how the links are positioned to your customers.


What to Look for when Using the IP Report
Use the IP Report if you notice a Publisher has begun to generate a lot of clicks or transactions (especially if you have a CPC or per-form offer) seemingly overnight. This is usually a sign of artificially created activity, i.e. not from web surfer traffic.

Section by section, here's what to look for in the IP Address, Visitor ID Report, and Referral URL Reports.

The IP Address Section
The IP Address section will tell you if one specific computer location is responsible for the activity. If you see a normally descending distribution of clicks (note the "Count" column), then all is probably normal. However, if one IP address seems to be responsible for all the activity from this Publisher, you may need to investigate further.

Click on the IP address in the interface. This drills down and lists all the Visitor IDs and Referrer URLs associated with the clicks from this IP. This will help you further determine the likelihood of invalid activity. If you see the same Visitor ID throughout or for a majority of the clicks, along with the same URL or "-Direct Request-" as the referrer URL, this is likely invalid activity.

Here's why: One IP address means one computer (or one network of computers) has generated this traffic. That's one sign that one person could be behind this activity. Secondly, one Visitor ID means only one cookie was set on the browser. While one IP address could be many networked computers, if you see one IP address with the same Visitor ID, this rules that possibility out, and tells you it's one computer and one user.

If the URL is consistent, then check the page. The person may have sat there and clicked on a link that was or is still there. If you don't see the link, this does not mean it was not there a few days ago, as it may have since been removed. If the URL says "-Direct Request-", that means the user was entering the affiliate link directly in the location bar of his browser and hitting "go" or Enter.

You may not find Visitor IDs or Referrer URLs. No Visitor IDs means someone blocked cookies. No Referrer URLs could mean artificially generated clicks.

The Visitor ID Section
 The Visitor ID section lists the individual cookies placed for each unique user. When you click on the Visitor ID, you can see the IP address and the Referral URL. Using the same logic as above for the IP Address section, you can see if one user was clicking from one computer from one page.

The Referrer URL Section
 The Referrer URL tells you the URL from which a user clicked to get to your site. You may view the URL by clicking on it. If you cannot find your link on that page, this does not mean this report is wrong. Remember what we said earlier: just because you don't see a link now, does not mean it was not there a few days ago. The web changes all the time.

However, sometimes you can see your link on the page. Now look at the page. Does it look legitimate? Does this site and page look like a site that would really get that much traffic or generate sales? Or is it just your link or a lot of links slapped on a page? Chances are that if either of these are the case, this person is not playing by the rules.

If you see that this site appears to be legitimate, you may have a great case study on your hands of what Publishers should do and how they should promote you. Of course, make sure they are promoting you legally and without false misrepresentation. Make sure there is not a text link that promotes something else but goes to your site. To figure this out, you're going to have to know some HTML code and look at the source of the page. Ask your technically-savvy co-workers for help with this.