In-Ad vs On-Site Measurement in FouAnalytics
For those practitioners who asked about the difference between in-ad and on-site measurement in FouAnalytics.
In-ad tags are used to measure programmatic campaigns. The tags ride along with the display and video ads that get sprayed out on thousands of sites. Because the tags are inside the ad iframe, and the ad serving domains are different from the domain of the publishers’ pages, cross domain browser security means the tag cannot look outside of the ad iframe itself. The tag will only see mouse movements and clicks when the user moves the mouse on top of the ad iframe and then clicks on it.
The on-site tags are usually used by publishers to measure their sites for bot traffic. It is also used by some marketers that have landing pages or ecommerce sites to which their ads click through. When the FouAnalytics tag is on the page, it can “see” page scrolling, mouse movements, clicks, etc. And those things contribute to the dark blue.
Practitioners who see very little dark blue or light blue in the in-ad measurement need not be concerned. That is typical for in-ad measurement. On-site measurement looks entirely different and our fraud detection code is tuned differently. This is also why some of the other fraud detection technologies are not reliable or accurate — i.e. they don’t differentiate their tags based on the placement location. So the same tag from the same vendor shows different IVT numbers when used by the advertiser (in-ad) compared to when used by the publisher (on-site). And because they are “black box” they don’t supply any supporting details to enable buyers and sellers to troubleshoot and understand why something was marked as fraudulent.
FouAnalytics is analytics and all the supporting details are in the dashboard so you can understand why something is labeled as fraudulent or not fraudulent. If you need help, just ask me.