Unique Clicks/Views

andrewm

Obviously there is no way to completely ensure unqiue clicks/views, but...

What means do you use in your scripts other than tracking unique IP addresses to attempt to filter unique clicks/views?

ajbrown

That depends on what level of uniqueness you need. I track session id's for my advert programs, which is good enough for that type of setup.

Tracking by IP is risky -- people connecting through proxy server or through a corporate gateway (Where they have 1 public IP for hundreds of private IPs) will be treated as 1 person.

Your best bet is to set a cookie on the user's machine after clicking a link. That will give you the best results.

andrewm

But then, how would you deal with someone who doesn't accept cookies or deletes/edits the cookie(s) you are setting?

If a user clicks any given ad and you record his click in a cookie/via a session, how long before you would count a click again from him for that ad (a day, a month, etc.)?

Do you check user-agent to filter out any bots/crawlers? Obviously you can fake it, but every "fake" click you can filter out makes it worth it.

When dealing with CPC advertising I think it's better to have a low estimate of "unique" clicks as opposed to an over estimate, but that's just my opinion.

I'm not currently trying to implement something like this, but I may be in the near future and I'm honestly just curious how people have confronted this issue.