Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for PubGuru Traffic Cop

This post was most recently updated on October 31st, 2022

What does Traffic Cop do and what happens when it detects invalid traffic?

Traffic Cop is built to detect invalid traffic (IVT), usually bots or intentionally and abnormally manipulated traffic patterns.

What happens when Traffic Cop runs depends on whether the site is set for block or measure mode. For measure mode, nothing happens other than the analytic datapoint being logged.

Block mode is different. First, the visitor gets a popup with a captcha to solve. Most of the time, it’s from Google’s Recaptcha project, and we occasionally switch to a secondary piece of captcha technology for when sophisticated invalid traffic is detected as filling in Recaptcha (usually using nefarious means connected with trading pornography for users solving captchas).

When block mode is enabled, if the publisher is using our ad stack, ads are deferred and go unloaded until the captcha is solved.

If the publisher is running any on-page Adsense, AdX, or Google Ad Manager code, it must be wrapped inside our traffic quality wrapper function and placed above our javascript library.

window.__afterTrafficQualityExecute = function() { /* your onpage ad code here */ }

Will Traffic Cop mess with our page caching?

Currently, we only offer Traffic Cop as a javascript package. This means it does not affect your cache with WordPress, Nginx, varnish, or any other server-side technologies.

Does Traffic Cop require any changes to our DNS?

No. Traffic Cop is javascript only. No changes are necessary on your DNS. You keep total control over your own domains.

Is there a fallback banner that can be configured to load when the visitor is blocked?

When in block mode, the captcha appears for invalid traffic and is inside an inpage lightbox popup while ads are deferred. The visitor is forced to either complete the captcha or leave. No customization of the page is necessary.

What callbacks do you have available for the publisher?

As we have the captcha work out detection and processing of invalid traffic, there is only the captcha for when traffic is determined to be valid.  There are currently no callbacks for when the captcha fires. Publishers don’t need to change anything on page. Our Traffic Cop reporting shows analytics for the IVT detection accordingly.

To simplify implementations for publishers, the callback for when the captcha is solved or when the traffic is determined as not invalid is the same function as above. One of the main callbacks that our publishers do use is for logging ad render events to their own analytics endpoints.

window.__logAdRender = function(impression) { /* the impression object contains all known details about the impression */ }

Is there any geo-blocking in Traffic Cop?

While we do not use geo specifically, there are signals that align with geo that our machine learning has uncovered as relevant. So indirectly, we are taking geo into account.

Is there any log file showing who was blocked (or not blocked) and their details on the determinations why?

We have logs but only use these for internal debugging and machine learning purposes. We do not release them as it’d make the technology significantly easier to copy or nullify.

Can we run Traffic Cop in Google Tag Manager (GTM)?

We do not currently support running Traffic Cop in GTM.  It massively complicates the publisher setup for the callback functions.

Sign up for Traffic Cop today!

David Loschiavo