by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, October 10, 2017

Barometric, a division of AdTheorent, on Tuesday announced the release of its invalid traffic identification tool to reduce fraud and increase transparency.

Clean Score enables publishers to monitor the levels of invalid traffic coming to their sites, but also allows media buyers to keep an eye on the inventory.

Barometric, an MRC-accredited provider of cross-environment tracking and attribution, defines invalid traffic as any click or impression that may artificially inflate an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings.

The goal is to clean up a problem that some experts estimate cost the ad industry $7.2 billion in fraud, globally, in 2016.

Anthony Iacovone, president, Barometric, explains that the free version of the tool detects whether or not the site harbors invalid traffic without the knowledge of the owner, but blocking certain IP addresses requires a paid subscription.

Barometric’s main business is built for advertisers sold on a CPM basis. This platform caters to publishers, providing data to detect invalid traffic and fraud.

The platform will break down traffic data by type, including good and bad bots, data center traffic and non-human behavior. It plots the percentages of invalid traffic by month and by day. The historical reports allow Barometric to provide trend analysis to anticipate potential future problems.

One feature enables publishers to switch their reporting between the ability to make the data public and private. A private report would be visible only to the publisher, while the public report is visible to everyone, including search engines.

The subscription model provides more data in its reports, such as a list of fraudulent IP addresses. The idea is to have a high clean score in the 90s.

The data can be exported and brought into other platforms to combine it with the performance of the publishers such as viewability, site transparency, and more.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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