Traffic quality rules
Which kinds of traffic UluMob filters out and does not pay for, how placement rules apply, and how to watch your zone quality.
Advertisers pay for real people seeing and clicking ads. Every request, impression and click on your zones passes through automatic checks. Traffic that fails them is recorded as flagged: the advertiser is not charged, and you are not paid for it.
These checks protect the advertisers who fund your earnings. They also protect you: a zone that keeps sending flagged traffic loses value to every campaign that buys it.
What is filtered automatically
| Pattern | What happens |
|---|---|
| Bots and automated clients | Requests from crawlers, headless browsers, scripts and command-line tools, or with no browser identity at all, get no ad and no charge. Clicks from them are flagged. |
| Scripted request velocity | When one address asks the same zone for ads faster than a person browses, further requests in that minute get no ad and no charge. |
| Click flooding | Repeated clicks from the same address or the same visitor within a few seconds are flagged. Only the first counts. |
| Replayed links | Every click link works once. Opening it again still reaches the advertiser but is never billed. Expired links are not billed either. |
| Tampered or forged tracking | Click and impression links are signed. Altered or forged links are flagged or ignored. |
| Late or repeated impressions | An impression is billed once, only when the ad renders, and only within 30 minutes of the ad request. Repeats are ignored. |
You do not need to do anything to enable these checks. They run on every zone.
What you must not do
Some practices cannot be detected one request at a time, so they are covered by the rules you accept as a publisher. Do not:
- Force or hide placements. Ads must be visible to the visitor. Do not stack ads on top of each other, load codes in hidden or zero-size frames, place them off-screen or cover them with other elements.
- Generate impressions or clicks yourself. Do not refresh pages automatically to create impressions, click your own ads, or use software, bots, proxies or traffic exchanges to inflate numbers.
- Incentivise clicks. Do not reward visitors for clicking or viewing ads, and do not ask them to click.
- Mislead visitors into clicking. Do not disguise ads as content, navigation or download buttons.
- Place codes on sites that are not yours or not approved for your account.
As a guideline, use at most four ad codes per page. Pages crowded with ads tend to be reviewed more closely.
The complete rules are in the publisher policy.
Consequences
Flagged traffic is not paid. Where a zone or account breaks these rules, the account can be suspended. Suspension stops all zones on the account immediately.
Watch your own quality
Each zone in /app/publisher/zones shows a seven-day summary:
- Impressions and CTR (clicks as a share of impressions).
- Flagged: the share of the zone's impressions and clicks that failed the quality checks.
- Earnings for the period.
These are the same figures the UluMob team reviews. A sudden rise in the flagged share or an unusually high CTR usually points to one traffic source. Label your sources with sub-IDs (see Zone codes) and compare them in Sub-IDs and sites to find and drop the source.
The same summary is available to scripts at GET https://ulumob.com/api/v1/publisher/zones/quality.
If you buy traffic
Many publishers buy visitors from other sources. You are responsible for the quality of that traffic on your zones. Before scaling a new source:
- Give it its own sub-ID.
- Run it at a small volume for a few days.
- Check its flagged share and CTR against your other sources.
- Drop sources that stand out.
If you have questions about a specific pattern, write to [email protected] before you send the traffic.
Something missing or wrong? Tell us.