Money & metrics · also called TQ score, quality score (traffic), partner quality score
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.
Search engines and feed providers do not treat all partners alike. Behind the scenes they grade each source of traffic on how real its users are and how well its clicks perform for advertisers. Some providers show partners a score or tier in their dashboard; others keep it internal and let it show up as changes in RPC, caps or warnings. There is no single industry-wide scale, and the formulas are not published.
The ingredients are broadly known: the share of invalid traffic, how often clicks turn into advertiser conversions, signs of accidental clicking, consistency of location and device data, and policy compliance. Not to be confused with Google Ads' Quality Score, which rates an advertiser's keywords and ads.
Because the score drives earnings through smart pricing and risk through clawbacks and caps, operators try to measure quality themselves before the feed does. Independent tools do this by scoring each visit. ClearTrust's TQI Score™, for example, is a Traffic Quality Index built from more than 150 filters for bots, fake clicks and fake impressions.
Think of it like this
It is a credit score for traffic: you rarely see the formula, but it decides the terms you are offered.
An example
Say two sources both earn an estimated $0.27 per visit. Source A has 2% suspected invalid clicks, source B 25%. If B's revenue is later cut by a quarter to about $0.20, it only breaks even on a $0.20 CPC, and it drags down the account's standing.
Related terms
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.
Smart pricing
Smart pricing is Google's system for automatically lowering what an advertiser pays for a click on a partner site when that click is less likely to lead to a sale.
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.
Advertiser conversion
An advertiser conversion is the valuable action, such as a sale or lead, completed on the advertiser's own site after someone clicked their ad on a search feed.
Clawback (revenue deduction)
A clawback is revenue a feed removes from a publisher's earnings after the fact, usually because clicks were judged invalid and the advertiser was refunded.
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.