Ad Metrics & Abuse Prevention
Learn how Zerocost calculates impressions and clicks, and the systems we have in place to prevent abuse and ensure accurate billing for our partners.
How We Calculate Metrics
Impressions
An impression is counted when an ad is successfully rendered and visible within the user's viewport. Tracking events are fired from our localized SDK widgets.
Clicks
A click is tracked when a user actively clicks or taps on an ad unit. This immediately logs a click event and directly routes the user outcome securely.
Abuse Prevention Systems
Impression Deduplication
Impression tracking is deduplicated at the SDK layer per tab session. If the same ad is refreshed repeatedly in a tab, it is counted once until the page is reloaded or the tab is closed, which prevents inflation from rapid refresh loops.
Click Fraud & Deduplication
To prevent malicious click fraud or accidental double-clicking, we enforce a 3-hour deduplication window for ad clicks. Multiple clicks from the same IP address on the same ad within this generous window are completely ignored for billing purposes, thereby protecting our partners' budgets from illegitimate drain.
Database-Level Enforcement
Our deduplication rules are enforced rigorously at the lowest level directly via database triggers, ensuring that no metric inflation can bypass our core financial tracking systems. This architecture circumvents both client-side manipulation attempts and repeated API bombardment.