A paid click is Spider AF's definition for a user visit that arrived through a paid advertisement channel by clicking on one of its ads.
Spider AF measures traffic when the user browses the advertiser’s landing page (on arrival) rather than when there was a click on an ad or measuring it through a redirector. But in most cases, you should see the traffic on the dashboard labeled as "clicks". Due to the measurement happening later in the “click” journey, some discrepancies exist but should be closer to the real traffic numbers arriving to your page.
Below is an example of the flow a user’s browser goes through when arriving at a page through paid advertisement:
The user sees an ad on a publisher page. This is often called an (ad) impression.
After clicking on an ad, they get redirected to the advertiser’s page. In order to measure the (ad) “click”, they are often redirected through the ad network’s servers first.
Once the (ad) click has been measured, the user’s browser is finally redirected to the advertisers page.
Here, our tracker (javascript) measures each access (the JS measurement will end up being a “click”). If the access is recognized to have arrived through an ad click it is called a “paid click”.
Spider AF also relies on the URL structure and session data to capture the data required to determine whether a click is paid or not. Spider AF categorizes inbound traffic as paid based on the following:
if there is a custom UTM mapping detected in the current access, consider it as paid
mark as paid if google’s network macro is detected
google.com)mark as paid if it has a click id (e.g.
gclid)mark as paid if it came from the default paid utm_source/medium list
Why discrepancies exist:
Spider AF makes a best-effort approximation of what is believed to be the real paid traffic from any given ad network. Spider AF relies on documentation of the ad networks to understand what the network may treat as paid traffic.
Because the measurement happens during the advertiser’s page load, which is after the network’s click measurement, there can be several reasons for discrepancies with the ad network’s value:
the user closed the browser/tab before the advertiser page fully loaded our javascript tag
the ad network blocked the transition (e.g. because it detected fraud)
the user has an ad block which stopped a tag manager from fully loading the Spider AF tag
the connection dropped, was reset, etc.
the ad network categorizes paid clicks differently from Spider AF
For example, Google Ads typically only charges for the first 2 clicks of any GCLID. Spider AF uses this information to reproduce expected behavior with Spider AF tracker data to get as close as possible to Google Ads data.
Since Spider AF relies on URL structure and session data like host referrals data to attribute traffic, discrepancies can be introduced due to uncommon use cases. Spider AF groups ad networks by a similar name basis.