Overview
Fraudulent traffic, including bot clicks, fake conversions, proxy traffic, and datacenter-generated sessions, can silently drain your budget, distort your campaign data, and damage relationships with your advertisers.
Trackier's in-house anti-fraud tool is built directly into the platform, giving you the ability to define fraud detection rules, apply them to specific campaigns, publishers, or advertisers, and automatically allow or block traffic based on those rules, all without relying on a third-party integration.
Common Types of Fraud You Should Know About
Understanding the types of fraud that affect performance marketing campaigns helps you choose the right rules to set up in Trackier's anti-fraud tool.
Bot Traffic: Automated scripts or bots that simulate real user clicks and conversions. Bot traffic inflates your click numbers without any genuine user intent, leading to wasted spend and skewed data.
Click Fraud: Fraudulent or low-quality publishers repeatedly click on tracking links to generate fake clicks and artificially inflate their payout. This is one of the most common forms of fraud in affiliate marketing.
Datacenter Traffic: Traffic originating from datacenter IP ranges, such as AWS or GCP, rather than real user devices. Legitimate users rarely browse from datacenter IPs, making this a strong indicator of bot or fraudulent activity.
Proxy & VPN Traffic: Users or bots masking their real IP addresses using proxies, VPNs, or TOR networks to bypass geo-targeting restrictions or appear as unique users.
Device Emulation: Fraudsters using emulators or virtual devices to simulate app installs or conversions without any real device being involved. These sessions mimic genuine mobile traffic but come from controlled environments.
Fake Installs (CTIT Fraud): Bots triggering app installs within an unnaturally short time after a click. A real user would take some time to download and open an app; conversions firing in under a few seconds are almost always fraudulent.
Conversion Stacking: Multiple conversions being fired from the same IP address or device, often used to inflate payout numbers by making one user appear as many different converters.
Invalid Device IDs: Publishers passing empty, fake, or invalid GAID/IDFA values in their click data to bypass attribution checks or manipulate reporting.
How to Access the Anti-Fraud Tool
In your Trackier panel, go to Automation → Anti-Fraud Tools
Search for Trackier in the list of available tools
Click Config to open the fraud rule configuration page
Once you click on 'Config' you will be redirected to the page where you will be able to set the constraints (if any) and set multiple rules and actions for them.
Setting Up a Fraud Rule
Fraud rules are created and managed from the Manage Fraud Rules page. Follow the steps below to configure a new rule.
Step 1: Create a New Rule
On the Manage Fraud Rules page, you can view and manage all previously created rules. To create a new one, click the Actions button and select the option to add a new rule.
Step 2: Set up the filter
Setting up filters will allow you to add certain targeting to your rules based on the advertisers, publishers or campaigns and scope.
Name: Set the name for your rule, and the rule will be visible in the Manage Fraud Rules page by the same name.
Scope: This will allow you to select whether you want to check the fraud data only for clicks, conversions, or both.
Advertisers: This option will allow you to include or exclude advertisers to which you want to apply this rule.
Campaigns: This option will allow you to include or exclude campaigns to which you are trying to apply this rule.
Publishers: This option will allow you to include or exclude those publishers for whom you are willing to apply this rule.
Note: It is mandatory to give your rule a name; you will not be able to move on to the next step.
Step 3: Set up Restrictions
Basic restrictions will be the primary step, where you will see the multiple rules that you want to apply to the campaigns that are running live. Find the description of every rule mentioned in the screenshot below.
DataCenter Traffic Block - We have a helpful database of data centre IP addresses, including AWS and GCP, to assist you in identifying and blocking bot networks. By utilizing this resource, you can easily detect and track potentially fraudulent traffic from different publishers. As an example, if a session originates from an address within Amazon's AWS data centre range, it is unlikely to be legitimate.
Proxy Traffic Block - This is the list of Proxy Types we can detect and block the IP addresses associated with these Proxy types. We maintain a real-time database of public web proxies, so we can see sessions from them. So that no proxy traffic conversion gets validated.
Blacklist IP Block - In this, all the blacklisted IPs by different ISPs block all conversions from IP addresses known to perpetrate fraud, as well as anonymous IP addresses.
Unknown Device Block - In this, all the crawlers and emulator-type devices are blocked; we maintain the pattern and accordingly block the conversion from this type of traffic.
Block Empty Device ID - This option rejects all the clicks coming from devices without a GAID or IDFA. IOS 14 and above will not be checked for this rule.
Validate Device ID - If this rule is enabled, all the clicks coming from devices with an invalid GAID or IDFA will get rejected. IOS 14 and above will not be checked for this rule.
Unique IP Conversion: If you enable this rule, you will see that only one conversion will get recorded through one IP. Multiple conversions from the same IP or the same subnet of the IP will be blocked. We do have the option now for conversion IP as well.
Step 4: Set up CTIT Rules
CTIT Rule is a bit different from the rules that were set in the previous step. A condition is required to be fulfilled to take any action outside of this rule. Please take a look at the description of this rule in the image below.
CTIT Rule(Click To Install Time or Conversion Time): This helps you in case a bot is filling out the form or installing an APK, so you can set time with conditional logic, and if the conversion is less than or greater than the time set, then that conversion and goal associated with that click ID will get cancelled. Rules will be applicable from the click time.
Use a time stamp if you want to set a rule on the basis of time. The start time should be less than the end time. If you don't want to set the rule on a time basis, then leave it blank.
In case you want to apply this CTIT rule to all the goals except 1 or 2, you can do that by mentioning the goal you wish to include.
In case you want to cancel all conversions from the blocked click ID list, you can tick the box for the same.
Step 5: Setup ITET Rule
ITET rule, i.e. Install to event time through which you explicitly mention the desired time between install and event, post which any conversion will be marked as fraud and hence will be rejected.
Mention the goal and event name along with the condition that you want to apply and the time in seconds, minutes, hours or days.
For instance, if you provide "Default Goal" as install and “Demo purchase” as event and apply the logic of greater than and value is less than 5 sec, that means if the conversion time between these two goals is more than 5 sec, it will be marked as fraud and rejected by the ITET rule.
Step 6: Set up Action
The final step in setting up the fraud rule is to set an action for the fraud traffic that is accumulated. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Trackier provides you with the option to set the course of action for the fraud traffic that is recorded.
You can either allow the Fraud traffic or you can block the fraud traffic, depending on your requirement.
Allow Traffic and mark as Fraud: By selecting this option, you are allowing the traffic for the campaign, but in the notes, it will show as a Fraud click.
Block Traffic and Mark as Fraud: By selecting this option, you are blocking the traffic, which will reject the click and mark it as fraud.
Once the rule is set, you can easily access the reports and analytics part of the fraud tools to check the performance of the campaigns and publishers.
Viewing Fraud Reports and Analytics
Once your fraud rules are live, you can monitor their performance from the Fraud Tool Reports section. This includes data on rejected clicks and conversions, publisher-level fraud activity, and campaign-level fraud rates.
If you want to know more about reports and analytics, please read this article.
Why Use Trackier's Anti-Fraud Tool?
Protect your advertiser relationships by ensuring only quality traffic reaches their campaigns
Prevent financial losses from invalid clicks and fake conversions
Identify and block specific fraud patterns such as datacenter traffic, proxy sessions, and unknown devices
Access built-in fraud reports and analytics to monitor campaign health in real time
Set time-based rules to catch bot-driven installs and form fills using CTIT and ETET logic.
Expand your Knowledge:
thrilled to have put together a top-notch team of qualified experts who are available to handle any of your concerns and respond to any inquiries you may have. You can contact us at any time by sending an email to support@trackier.com or using the in-platform chat feature.
