Fraud & invalid traffic · also called Traffic Quality Index, TQI
TQI Score™
The TQI Score™ (Traffic Quality Index) is ClearTrust's measure of traffic quality, built from more than 150 filters for bots, fake clicks and fake impressions.
Anyone buying or selling traffic needs a way to say how good it is. ClearTrust, the ad-fraud and traffic-quality company that publishes The Arbitrage Desk, expresses this as the TQI Score™, short for Traffic Quality Index. It is built from 150+ filters that look for bots, fake clicks and fake impressions.
The idea of a traffic quality score fits search arbitrage naturally. An arbitrageur pays for visitors first and finds out weeks later, through finalised revenue and clawbacks, how many the search engine judged invalid. An independent quality measure applied to each traffic source, placement or Sub ID gives an earlier signal, so weak sources can be cut before they cost money or endanger a feed.
A score from an outside vendor is not the search engine's verdict. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo run their own invalid-traffic systems and make their own decisions. A third-party index is best understood as a second opinion and an early warning.
ClearTrust also offers ClickTrust, its click-fraud and invalid-click product for performance advertisers, and PubTrust, its ad-quality and malvertising protection for publishers.
Think of it like this
It works like a hygiene rating on a restaurant door: many separate checks are boiled down to one number you can act on.
Related terms
Traffic quality score
A traffic quality score is a rating of how genuine and commercially valuable a publisher's visitors are, used to decide what their clicks are paid, or whether to keep them.
IVT detection
IVT detection is the set of methods used to tell real, interested visitors from bots, fraud and accidental activity, before or after an ad is clicked.
Invalid traffic (IVT)
Invalid traffic is any click, search or ad view that does not come from a real person with genuine interest, whether caused by bots, fraud or honest accident.
Pre-click filtering
Pre-click filtering checks each visitor the moment they arrive and withholds the search ads from those judged invalid, before any click can be charged.
Post-click analysis
Post-click analysis studies what visitors did after clicking, in aggregate, to find invalid traffic that looked normal at the moment of the click.
Sources: ClearTrust