Compliance with international media standards

Adfox uses industry-standard methods and technologies. According to international standards, the key performance metrics for ad placements are viewable impressions and clicks.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit greatly from ad viewability data. Advertisers gain insight into ad performance across different placements, and publishers can pinpoint and improve site areas where ads have low visibility.

Counting impressions

Basic principles of counting ad impressions in Adfox:

• A viewable impression only counts if it matches the specified viewability parameters:
• The delivery of an ad and impression tracking link is initiated solely by the user. The ad content downloads when the user sends an HTTP request from the browser.
• Impressions are counted after ads are loaded fully on the browser page.

Auto-refresh

Rules of participation in the Yandex Advertising Network allow auto-refresh no more than once every 30 seconds.

Adfox verifies that sites comply with this requirement by checking for the adf_refresh parameter in the request. Site traffic is checked quarterly to ensure the auto-refresh criteria are met. If a site abuses auto-refresh, we take administrative action against it.

Prefetch

Ads shown on pre-fetched pages won't be counted. Preventing prefetch on partner sites:

1. The ad content is called using a link that is called only after processing special JS code.

2. Configuring and monitoring anti-fraud rules.

Caching control

To prevent caching in headers, requests and responses use special headers: cache-control: no-cache and pragma: no-cache.

A special mechanism is used to prevent caching of the link that is generated on ad click. The link is generated using dynamic parameters: platform ID, banner type, banner ID, and more. For security reasons, all link parameters are hashed.

Counting clicks

The diagram below shows the click counting workflow:

The user clicks an ad banner with a tracking link in the format https://ads.adfox.ru/.../clickURL?[crypted-data]. The [crypted-data] segment contains the encoded data allowing you to identify the banner associated with the link and site originating the click.

The link data is passed to the backend system that counts the banner click and generates a link to redirect the user to the advertiser website. The user is redirected to the advertiser site URL specified in the ad campaign settings.

The click count accuracy is provided by the following:

• The backend counts clicks before redirecting the user to the advertiser site.

• A click made outside of the ad banner area is not recorded and not included in the click count.

Duplicate clicks

If an ad gets multiple clicks during one impression, only one is counted in the statistics.

Click validation

Click validation uses a unified mechanism that works with historical data. If more than 24 hours have passed since the last user action, all the technical filter data is deleted from the history.

The mechanism validates clicks as follows: if more than 24 hours have passed between the ad impression and ad click, the click is considered invalid and is not counted.

If no impressions that passed anti-fraud are found for the validated clicks, the clicks do not count.

Click statistics

Reports display the number of clicks in the Clicks (IMS) column. This indicator includes filtering invalid traffic (SIVT and GIVT) by special fraud protection mechanisms. You can check the number of invalid clicks in the report on ad campaigns with IMS, in the columns Filtered clicks (IMS), GIVT/SIVT.

Viewability

Prefetch

Ads shown on pre-fetched pages won't be counted.

Processing of cross-domain iframes

To measure viewability, we use IntersectionObserver, and it works even with cross-domain iframes used in ad calls.

Caching control

To prevent caching, impressions are counted using the same methods.

Tracking the display of multiple ads

Each unique impression can be attributed only to one ad in Adfox.

Viewability metrics

Adfox evaluates ad viewability based on the following indicators:

• Viewable impression, Yandex (IMS) : Impressions meeting the Yandex viewability criteria: 50% of the banner area (30% for ads with an area of at least 242,500 pixels, which is equivalent to 970 × 250 px) remains in the active browser window for at least two seconds, with invalid traffic filtered out.

• Impressions (renders): Events that occur when ad rendering starts, with invalid traffic filtered out.

• Viewable Ad Impression: Ad impressions in the viewable area of the active browser tab, counted using the criteria established by international media industry standards: how many pixels (in percent) remain in the viewable area and for how long they remain there, with invalid traffic filtered out.

  • Banner ads on the site or in the app: 50% of ad pixels must be in the viewable area for at least one second.
  • Large ads (242,500 pixels, which is equivalent to 970 × 250 px, or larger): 30% of the pixels must remain in the viewable area for at least one second.
  • Video ads on the site or in the app: 50% of the video ad pixels must remain in the viewable area for at least two seconds of video playback.

• Viewable rate (IMS): The percentage of viewable impressions (as defined by international media industry standards), relative to all impressions for which viewability was determined, with invalid traffic filtered out. Calculated as:
  
  $\frac{\text{Viewable impressions (IMS)}}{\text{Viewable impressions (IMS)} + \text{Non-viewable impressions (IMS)}} × 100\%$

• Measured Rate (IMS): The ratio of impressions with determined viewability to the total number of Impressions (IMS), with invalid traffic filtered out. Calculated as:
  
  $\frac{\text{Viewable impressions (IMS)} + \text{Non-viewable impressions (IMS)}}{\text{Viewable impressions (IMS)} + \text{Non-viewable impressions (IMS)} + \text{Impressions with unknown viewability (IMS)}} × 100\%$

• Non-viewable ad impressions (IMS): Impressions for which ad rendering was recorded, but viewability couldn't be confirmed per international media industry standards, with invalid traffic filtered out.

• Undetermined ad impressions (IMS): Impressions whose viewability couldn't be determined, with invalid traffic filtered out.

These indicators do not include invalid impressions (SIVT and GIVT) and viewable impressions, filtered out by special fraud protection mechanisms.

Mobile advertising

Content delivery, impression and click counting on mobile devices, and procedures and policies for auto-refresh and prefetch are similar to those used for sites.

In-app advertising

Yandex ads are served in mobile apps using the MobileAds SDK, a library package for integrating the Yandex Advertising Network and Adfox into mobile apps. For more information about the MobileAds SDK, see the documentation.

We check ad viewability in mobile apps using the same criteria as for website ads:

• Viewability is checked according to international media standards: 50% of the banner area must remain in the active window for at least one second.
• For video ads, a viewable impression counts if at least 50% of the player remains in the user's viewable area for at least two seconds.

For banner, interstitial, and native in-app ads, click viewability also applies: if there's less than 50% of the banner area in the active browser window, but the user clicks it and the system counts that click, then a viewable impression is still counted.

To confirm ad viewability, the following steps are taken:

1. Ad is downloaded.

2. An ad appears on screen, or it's called using the show method. At this point, a rendering event is sent.

3. The SDK starts the viewability check. The following factors are checked in turn:

   1. Ad viewability percentage (Visibility Percent).
   2. The interval during which the ad should remain in the viewable area (Shownotice Delay).

4. A timer starts, which checks the viewability percentage every 0.2 seconds. The continuous viewing time starts to be counted.

5. For continuous viewability during the Shownotice Delay, the timer stops, and the SDK sends a request via the viewability confirmation link. Otherwise, the continuous viewing time is reset and starts again. If no confirmation is sent within 60 seconds for poor internet connection, the viewable ad impression is not counted.

The SDK retrieves device and platform information from the system API provided by iOS and Android, including the advertising ID, location data (if its collection is allowed in both the app and the SDK), and screen properties.

Restrictions for different OS versions

The platform version is sent with each ad request. Depending on the platform, there are various restrictions:

Restrictions for Android

Restrictions for iOS

Minimum supported version — Android 2.3.3. Video ads are only selected for devices with Android 5.0 and higher.

• iOS 8.0 or higher is required to load any type of ad. Video ads are only served to devices with iOS 10.0 or higher.

Check the app status

Ad viewability is checked and impressions are counted only if the following conditions are met:

For Android

For iOS

• The app is active (the device's screen is unlocked);
• The app is running in the foreground;
• Ads are served in the app's active window.

• The app is active (the app state is Active, not Inactive or Background);

• Ads are served in the app's active window.

Impressions are also counted if the app is launched on an emulator or simulator and the above conditions are met.

Auto-update, prefetch

Ad units don’t support external auto-refresh methods. The auto-refresh and prefetch procedures and policies are similar to those used for websites.

Anti-fraud protection

To remove invalid traffic (IVT), a log marked by the anti-fraud system is used. The data that passed the anti-fraud check is used for statistics.

Main sources of invalid traffic detection:

• Monitoring system.
• Reports from advertisers and site owners.
• Regular analysis of the IVT generation services market.
• Searching for patterns.
• Extension of known IVT types.

Ad events originating from Yandex employees on the internal network are excluded from statistics.

Adfox's ad anti-fraud system protects against general and sophisticated IVT. To filter out the invalid traffic, we use these methods:

General (GIVT — general invalid traffic)

• Technical filtering.
• Internal traffic filtering. This is done via a shared list of IP address ranges (IP ranges of Yandex data centers and IP ranges of the Yandex internal user networks).
• Filtering out primitive bots. The process involves validating user agents against lists, checking IP addresses, verifying URL signatures, validating user cookies, and examining the referer.

Non-standard (SIVT — sophisticated invalid traffic)

• Heuristic rules.
• Machine-learned rules.
• Machine learning models.
• Clustering and other methods.

The advertising anti-fraud system actively exchanges statistics with other Yandex anti-fraud systems and reuses this data.

Identification of new IVT types

New IVT types are identified through:

• Monitoring system that tracks traffic deviations.
• Various traffic and site clustering methods.
• Analysis of the advertiser reports.
• Signals from anti-fraud systems.

IVT detection based on lists or parameters

The system uses the tables that list the ranges of IP addresses generating a large amount of fraudulent traffic. With these options, you can:

• Send events from these addresses to a dedicated log, events from which aren't counted anywhere.
• Flag events from these addresses and send them to the main anti-fraud system, which will mark them as suspicious.

In addition, the system uses a table of regular expressions to detect fraudulent User Agents. The User Agent must match at least one regular expression from the list of valid ones and not match any of the suspicious ones. With special flags, you can configure sending suspicious events to a separate log, and they won't take part in further processing.

Falsification of viewable impressions

Anti-fraud rules and tools apply to both viewable impressions and other impression types.

Filtered impressions, viewable impressions and clicks are removed from all statistics reports. You can view statistics on filtered-out (invalid) impressions, viewable impressions, and clicks in the report on ad campaigns with IMS.

If an advertiser suspects that their statistics contain unfiltered fraud, they can contact Yandex via the feedback form. The request is investigated, and if suspicions are confirmed, filtered impressions, viewable impressions and clicks are removed from all statistics reports.

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