Terminus Improves Visitor ID By Eliminating Non-Human Traffic

Overview

Traffic to your website can come from a myriad of sources, and it can be a challenge to differentiate crawlers and legitimate users coming from corporate networks. Over the course of the last few weeks, we have implemented product changes to address this challenge and improve our customers' site visit data. Specifically we have enhanced our Visitor ID tracking technology and improved our ability to proactively identify and filter out traffic from crawlers, ISPs, bots, and other non-human traffic sources.

As of July 31, 2020 Terminus rolled out a new filtering algorithm to ensure even more accuracy around our Visitor Identification. This technology was built using proprietary analysis and state of the art fraud and bot blocking technology, alongside key partners. After applying learnings based on analyzing billions of ad impressions, and nearly a billion Visitor ID visits, Terminus’s new algorithm significantly cuts down the noise and brings trending accounts right to the forefront. Customers will now be able to more easily focus on valuable traffic to their website, without the noise of non-human traffic. This empowers more efficiency in sales and marketing operations. 

Stay tuned for more coming upgrades to our Visitor ID; this was the first step towards our full VISID 2.0 implementation. Over the next few weeks you will see a significant pick up in identified traffic as we implement this same learning technology across residential IPs to begin identifying your traffic better as they continue to work from home. 

Q&A

Does this impact my Terminus Advertising or Conversions? 

This change does not impact Terminus Ads. In-fact, we used our technology developed to ensure clean ad delivery in order to deliver this change. This change does not impact view-through visits and view-through conversions. 

This change will only impact our Visitor ID.

What are the immediate impacts of this change? 

Millions of crawlers, ISPs, bots, and other non-human traffic sources were scanned, vetted, and filtered out in this process. This means that customers will notice a drop in site visits. Most of the companies responsible for these visits are large cloud service providers. However, over time this will stabilize and provide more meaningful and accurate information. Not all customers will be impacted the same. Any changes to your site visit data will be apparent from July 31, 2020. 

What exactly was filtered out? 

Terminus will no longer report on visits from known IP addresses that are associated with crawlers, bots, data centers, or other automated traffic. This will not affect our identification of human traffic. Many technology companies power their products by crawling the web or using verification tools. For example, a marketer utilizing Microsoft cloud services or advertising tech will have their website tracked by crawlers coming from Microsoft’s servers. Terminus strives to report on as little of this non-human traffic as possible, and focus on reporting only on visits from employees at Microsoft or elsewhere. 

Top non-human traffic sources that will be blocked:

• Google, Inc.
• Digital Turbine Inc.
• MICROSOFT CORPORATION
• Hubspot Inc
• Zscaler Inc

Note: This change will not retroactively filter out any visits from aforementioned devices that may have been previously tracked.

Why was Terminus previously reporting this traffic?

All tools that track website visits collect this type of traffic. Many of them require users to manually filter data. Terminus is continuously making improvements to assist marketers in focusing on meaningful web activity from their targeted accounts.