Distinguishing unintentional clicks from intentional ones

[alois-bissuel]

Hello,

In some circumstances, people may click on ads without wanting to do so. This can be the case, for example on mobile devices, where an ad is clicked while the user just wanted to close it. Some sites may also use shady patterns to drive clicks, like showing ads on top of content in an unexpected way.

While those unintentional clicks may lead to higher CPMs, they do not lead to any advertiser value and produce a frustrating user experience, i.e. being sent to a site the user does not wish to go to. Therefore, distinguishing between “normal” and unintentional clicks is required for managing campaigns. Based on that distinction, this may lead to:

• reviewing the design of an ad
• stop displaying ads on certain sites
• for a DSP, not billing an advertiser for a certain number of clicks (when a CPC billing model is in place)

The usual practices to determine whether a click is likely to be intentional or not are:

1. Looking at the coordinates of the click on the ads. On mobile, clicks that are located in the top right corner of an ad are likely to be attempts at closing the ad, rather than navigating to the advertiser site.
2. Looking at the sequence of events following the user landing on the advertiser site. Does the user immediately leaves the site? Or do they browse several pages? In that respect, the analysis is usually done on the number of events and the type of events (e.g. category view, product view, sale…) following the click within a certain timeframe.

Based on this data, a hierarchy of click “quality” can be defined. This hierarchy would typically have a max of 3 to 4 levels, from the “likely intentional click” to the “likely unintentional click”. An entity managing a campaign would need reporting across this classification on:

• The clicks volume and costs (per domain, device type…)
• Attribution (per domain, device type…)

Note: we’d like to highlight that events of the advertiser site following a click are used here for two distinct purposes:

• Setting the “click quality”. Any type of event (landing on the advertiser site, browsing product pages…) can usually be used for that.
• Do attribution per se, i.e. linking a conversion (sale) to a click. Typical events used for that are sales.

To the best of your knowledge, qualifying clicks based on events on the advertiser site has not been discussed previously.

On the technical side, a new header could be added to the API to signify that a trigger event should be used to qualify the click. As a final word, the tentative worklet-based aggregation key generation may enable this use case, but only for the aggregate API.