We’ve had a few Advertisers and Publishers ask recently how we track clicks, whether we use “Raw” or “Unique” clicks. 

MadisonAvenue.com is built to track raw clicks as we’ve found that’s the only universally understood and reproducible measure of clicks.  The problem with “Unique Clicks” is the definition is open to judgment calls.  The concept is simple of course, a Unique Click should be a click from a unique individual.  What gets tricky is how do you determine that?  The best gauge would to utilize cookies.  What happens if the visitor has cookies disabled?  Use IP addresses?  What if the user is on a network with multiple users but shows up to the world as a single IP address?  We’ve got 20 people in our office but only one outside IP address.  Conversely, what if the user is on a dynamic IP address with their ISP and has a different address every time he or she connects?  The only way to answer these questions is to make a judgment call.  That means actual results of what a “Unique Click” is varies depending on who you ask or what system you’re using.

On the other hand, a Raw Click is a simple concept.  Every time there’s a click on an advertisement it registers as a click.  Universal no matter who you ask.  Now, of course on our system we’ve built in automatic fraud protection.  If there are too many clicks from a single IP address within a 24 hour period we simply ignore those clicks.  Advertisers don’t get charged, Publishers don’t get paid.  It’s like they never happened as they’re fraudulent anyway.

In practice this has never been a problem for any of our Advertisers.  Those that we’ve gotten feedback from have never shown more than a 5% variance between the Raw Clicks we record and the Unique Clicks registered in their own internal tracking systems.