Exploring Non-Human Traffic in Online Digital Advertisements: Analysis and Prediction

An advertisement (ad) click fraud occurs when a user or a bot clicks on an ad with a malicious intent where advertisers need to pay for those fake clicks. Click-fraud is a serious problem for the online advertising industry. Our study demonstrates a hybrid approach using a two-level fingerprint to detect the illegitimate bots targeting ad click fraud. The approach consists of two detection phases: (1) a rule-based phase and (2) a machine learning-based phase. The first level of the fingerprint is used for rule-based detection phase. It is generated using immutable information about the user and traversing a website’s page. The second level of the fingerprint is generated using ad click behavioral patterns. It is used for machine learning-based detection phase. Different traditional classification algorithms were evaluated to be applied in the machine learning-based detection phase. To test our approach, we used a real commercial website for ads called Waseet where the access log of the website server was utilized as a dataset for our experiments. The results of our experiments show that our proposed hybrid approach entails promising results.

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