Traffic Quality & Invalid Traffic (IVT) Policy

At PPCmate, you only pay for real people seeing your ads. This page explains how we keep invalid traffic out of your campaigns: what we check, when, and what you can see for yourself.

Our principles

1. Stop it before we buy it. Most protection happens before a bid is placed. If we don’t trust a request, we don’t bid on it.
2. Never charge for refused traffic. Any view or click refused after delivery is excluded from your bill. It shows as “not charged” in your reports.
3. Show the evidence. Every campaign has a Quality Receipt, so you can see where your ads ran and what we filtered.
4. Quality over volume. When a new filter removes traffic, we accept the lower volume. We never loosen a protection to keep numbers up.

What we check before bidding

Every ad request passes these checks before we decide to bid:

• Known bad sources. A continuously updated blocklist of domains, apps, placements and publisher zones caught by our detectors.
• Data centers and servers. Traffic from hosting providers, cloud servers and known proxy networks, rather than people.
• Bots and fake browsers. Invalid, outdated or fabricated browser identities, and devices whose details contradict each other.
• Location consistency. Requests whose declared location doesn’t match where they actually come from.
• Excessive repetition. Too many requests or views from the same connection.
• Seller authorization (ads.txt / app-ads.txt). We check that the site or app authorizes the seller offering it to us.
• Supply-chain verification (schain / sellers.json). We check that every seller in the chain is declared by the exchange it claims to belong to. Our own supply partners are listed publicly in our sellers.json.
• Fake or unlisted apps. Apps that don’t exist in any app store.
• Spoofed and made-up domains. Sites pretending to be a well-known brand, and generated or junk domain names.

Brand safety

• We read the actual content of the sites your ads appear on, not just their names.
• Pirated video, music, software and books, illegal streaming, and similar content are blocked automatically once confirmed.
• Adult sites are kept off Mainstream campaigns.
• Farms of fake video-player pages on free hosting services are detected and blocked daily.

What we check after delivery

Some invalid activity only shows up after an ad is shown. We check every view and click, and anything refused is not charged:

• Clicks that happen too fast to be human, or come from a hidden frame
• Repeated or duplicate clicks and views
• Clicks from a different connection, browser or country than the ad view
• Clicks with no matching ad view, and pages preloaded by the browser but never seen
• Late or incomplete tracking events

Viewability

We measure whether pop-under and banner ads were actually visible. Advertisers can require a minimum viewable percentage per campaign.

Always-on monitoring

• Dozens of detectors analyse traffic every day. New detectors run in “shadow” mode first and only start blocking after their results are verified.
• Every block is recorded, and mistaken blocks can be reversed.
• A weekly self-audit re-tests our detectors against known traps, so a broken check can’t pass silently.

Your Quality Receipt

Every active campaign has a Quality Receipt. Open it from the shield icon on your Campaigns list. It shows:

• where your ads ran, and whether each site’s content was checked;
• how much traffic was refused before and after delivery, and why;
• how much was not charged;
• viewability against the platform norm.

Learn more about the Quality Receipt

Standards we follow

• IAB Tech Lab ads.txt / app-ads.txt, sellers.json and SupplyChain (schain). We verify incoming supply chains and add our own node to requests we resell.
• OpenRTB for all programmatic buying and selling.

Questions or a traffic concern?

If you believe traffic on your campaign is invalid, contact our support team through the chat in your dashboard. We’ll investigate, and anything confirmed is refused and not charged.