How We Count Clicks
The Katalys Marketing Platform has these primary dimensions available to count clicks:
Clicks (also called “Unique Clicks”)
Gross Clicks
Invalid Clicks
Duplicate Clicks (not visible as a metric)
These metrics are related. Gross Clicks is the sum of Unique Clicks + Invalid Clicks + Duplicate Clicks. Note: Duplicate Clicks is not an independent metric on our reporting interface, but can be easily calculated using the other above dimensions, if need arises.
Metric Definitions
Gross clicks are the total number of clicks you’ve received from tracking links, and unique clicks indicate the number of unique users clicking through. One user clicking the tracking link two times counts as two gross clicks, but only one unique click.
Our ad server uses cookies placed in the user’s browser to determine click uniqueness. When a user clicks a tracking link for the first time, two cookies are placed: aff_conversions and enc_aff_session_X (where X is the offer ID). A unique click is counted when the enc_aff_session_X cookie is placed for the first time. If that user clicks the tracking link again, a gross click is counted and the enc_aff_session_X cookie is refreshed with new session information. Session cookies are supposed to last 30 days; however, recent changes in privacy mean that typically cookies only last for the duration of a “session”, which typically means the length of a single browser tab.
Invalid clicks are clicks that come from bots, crawlers, ad servers, or link validation services. The clicks are serviced the same as a regular click, meaning the web browser was sent through to the destination page. The click is counted as invalid because it was likely not a real internet user who executed the action. SEO publishers who see heavy indexing traffic from Google will see significant numbers of Invalid Clicks on their account; this is expected behavior and is not a negative indicator. We count Invalid Clicks so we can safely eliminate bot sessions from metric reporting while still providing a consistent SEO-friendly service.
Invalid Clicks are not taken into account when calculating Cost per Click (CPC) and Earnings per Click (EPC). Instead, only the Clicks metric (that currently represents Unique clicks excluding Invalid Clicks) is used to calculate CPC and EPC.
What if I’m missing clicks?
If you have implemented a click tracker in front of Katalys tracking, sometimes the Gross Clicks metric will not match the click metric in your “upstream” tracker. This is due to technical reasons: DNS response times on last mile, limited redirect capacity of bot clients, and maximum navigation depth of crawlers. If you see a large amount of bot activity, you will likely see a differential between your own Clicks metric and Katalys' Gross Clicks metric.