Why am I seeing a click discrepancy between Terminus and my other web analytics tools? – Terminus Help Center

Terminus employs state of the art technology in order to avoid ad fraud and to ensure that our customers' ads reach top placements across the web. In order to ensure brand safety, and ad viewability with our display partners, Terminus utilizes a demand-side platform (DSP) that allows us to obtain premium inventory. Our DSP runs tests, sometimes in excess of ten times a day on each ad in order to verify the landing pages are valid, the ad server is responding, and the creative is rendering, among other tests. These tests are run due to the fact that these premium inventory sources are often receiving tens of thousands to millions of bids per day on their ad inventory and can only fulfill so much. By ensuring the creative is constantly ready to be served we can fulfill inventory faster and win more bidding.

Sometimes when Terminus ad campaigns are "Paused" instead of deleted, the campaign is paused in our DSP, but the ads remain in a "live" state. This, in turn, has the ad server continue to do verification, which will appear as clicks on your website. This traffic will typically appear from places where there are Tier 1 data servers such as Mclean, Virginia, New York, NY, and others.

While many of these clicks are automatically filtered out of Terminus reports, it is possible that not all of them are caught by our systems. Third party analytics tools, like Google Analytics for example, do not have parameters in place to filter out these clicks, which is why it can sometimes look like there is a reporting discrepancy between Terminus and other systems.

It is also likely that customers will see a spike in clicks when new tactics are launched, or changes are made to existing tactics (ex: new creative is added, landing pages are updated, etc.), as the verification process will need to initiate again.

Related articles

You must sign in to view this content.