Earlier today, I announced a change for AdLogger, one of my key projects that I’m developing. My plan for a while has been to switch AdLogger’s focus from the publisher to the advertiser. Afterall, click fraud affects advertisers the most and they are the ones who feel it in their pocketbook.
Right now, AdLogger is specifically for website publishers to monitor the performance of their AdSense ads and selectively display those ads based on a visitor’s clicking history or admin-defined settings. There are a couple things that are bad about this model.
First, AdLogger cannot be extremely accurate. If you read on the FAQs page, I discuss why that is, but basically it’s because it’s a guessing game. The AdLogger script has to estimate when a visitor clicks on an AdSense ad. There’s no exact, definitive way to do it.
Second, advertisers are the ones who are paying the money. They are the ones who have an investment to protect. They need a solution to monitor their clicks to make sure they’re getting the best return. Publishers, on the other hand, their only concern is usually getting banned from an advertising network.
Tracking clicks for advertisers could be much more accurate than the current system of tracking clicks for publishers.
Having said that, AdLogger will switch from a publisher’s tool to an advertiser’s. However…
An Important Note: The 1.4.x (and possibily 1.5.x) version branch of AdLogger will continue to be the current system for publishers. It will always be available and maintained for security or performance bug fixes.
The main development trunk from now on, though, will focus solely on the advertisers.
This will not happen immediately. I believe this development will begin after the release of either 1.4.1 or 1.4.2.
I’ve started a discussion page for this in the AdLogger forum: http://www.adlogger.org/forum/showthread.php?t=831
Might I suggest leaving AdLogger as we know it for publishers, and creating a new product for advertisers? Sure you could tell publishers to download an older version of AdLogger, but that’s just confusing. Not to mention, in my opinion, damages the popularity in the end. Two solutions and everyone gets what they want. AdLogger and say… AdRecord, or AdSecure, or AdAssure, etc.
Will adlogger able to prevent click fraud for peoples who are using the adlogger for the past 5 months?