PushPop / Pop-underNativeWhich Adsterra zones send real traffic?
Not all Adsterra traffic is equal. ValidVisit scores every visit 0–100 and pins it to the exact zone that sent it — so you can tell real humans from bots and invalid clicks, worst zones first.
placement in AdsterraThe buyer either toggles the State switch OFF next to underperforming placement IDs on the Statistics page (bulk actions supported), or pastes the comma-separated placement IDs into the Blacklist field in the campaign's Advanced Settings (also possible in bulk via API v3).
ValidVisit reports the device, OS, browser — down to the version — plus the language and ISP behind every flagged visit, and Adsterra supports OS version, browser version, language, device type and connection type targeting. The segments we flag are segments you can exclude.
How invalid traffic slips in through Adsterra zones.
Adsterra operates one of the largest push notification and pop-under networks on the web, aggregating inventory from thousands of independent publishers across dozens of verticals and geographies. That scale is a genuine asset for reach — and a genuine challenge for traffic quality. Push notification inventory is built on subscriber lists that publishers accumulate over time; when those lists age, get traded, or are inflated through incentivized opt-ins, the clicks that flow from them look nothing like genuine user intent. Pop-under and direct-link placements introduce a different pressure: automated tools can cycle through landing page URLs in non-interactive sessions, generating click events without a human ever engaging with the content. ValidVisit examines every visit arriving from Adsterra and reduces it to a single 0–100 quality score drawn from 100+ independent data points — covering the network the click came from, the device behind it, and how the visitor behaves — so you can pinpoint the specific zones and placements generating the problem and exclude them directly inside your Adsterra campaign settings.
Push and pop inventory on Adsterra expose different IVT mechanics, and both are worth watching. On the push side, the clearest signal is subscriber-list automation: clicks arrive in tight mechanical bursts from a narrow set of network origins rather than the organic scatter of real users opening notifications across different times and connections. The same cloud-hosted infrastructure showing up repeatedly against one Zone ID is a particularly strong tell — genuine push subscribers receive notifications on residential or mobile connections, not server farms. Proxies and VPN exit nodes are a secondary pressure, used by bad actors to make automated traffic appear geographically diverse and obscure its true origin.
On the pop and direct-link side, the picture shifts toward how the visiting session actually behaves once it lands. ValidVisit weighs each visit against 100+ separate data points — what kind of environment the session is running in, whether its device characteristics hang together the way a real browser's would, and whether the on-page behavior matches a human reading a page rather than a script touching a URL — and folds all of it into one 0–100 quality score. Automated click injectors that never really render the page tend to leave gaps across several of those measurements at once, even when their headline click event looks clean. Because Adsterra passes Zone ID (##ZONE_ID##) and Placement ID (##PLACEMENT_ID##) at the click level, every quality score can be mapped directly to the sub-source that generated it, making it straightforward to tell whether a problem is isolated to one underperforming zone or spread across a broader slice of inventory.
What to watch on Adsterra
When a single ##ZONE_ID## value produces a disproportionate share of clicks within a short window — and those clicks share near-identical session durations with no downstream micro-events — you are likely seeing subscriber-list automation rather than real engaged users. Filter your ValidVisit reports by zone to isolate and review these clusters before excluding the zone in Adsterra campaign settings.
##PLACEMENT_ID## segments that show sustained click volume but zero conversions or engagement signals across multiple days are worth treating as a quality flag. ValidVisit's quality score separates bot-driven clicks from simply low-intent human traffic, which matters for the decision to exclude a placement outright versus adjusting your bid or creative for that segment.
Genuine push subscribers are overwhelmingly on residential and mobile network connections. When ValidVisit surfaces a concentration of clicks originating from hosting infrastructure tied to the same ##ZONE_ID##, it indicates the subscriber list behind that zone contains automated or non-human entries — not real opted-in users. The ##SUB_ID_SHORT(action)## token lets you trace the click chain back to the originating action for additional context.
Pop-under and direct-link placements are a common target for non-interactive browser automation because the format requires no visible user gesture. ValidVisit looks at how each session actually loads and behaves once it reaches your page; a ##PLACEMENT_ID## where a meaningful share of clicks never show the on-page behavior of a real visit is a sign that those sessions are not running in a genuine browser environment.
Pinpoint the bot publishers & placements in Adsterra.
Adsterra itself isn't the problem — bots and invalid traffic concentrate in a handful of its sub-sources: the publisher, site or zone, and the placement or widget within it. So we roll the score up by those Adsterra tokens, not by creative (which says nothing about whether a click was human).
Bought as one Adsterra line, your spend is a single number. Scored per sub-source it runs from 93 down to 16 — the worst is nearly all bots. That’s the leak a blended average hides.
Adsterra traffic scored 0–100 per sub-source, worst first — down to the placement you buy.
Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
- Zone ID
##ZONE_ID##Zone identifier (publisher/site zone) the traffic originated from.
Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
- Placement ID
##PLACEMENT_ID##ID of the actual traffic source / placement where the ad was shown.
Per-click id: Adsterra passes a unique click id, so we also run velocity, deduplication and repeat-source checks on every visit.
Compare bot & invalid-traffic breakdown across every ad network →See your own Adsterra sub-sources scored this way.
How ValidVisit attributes Adsterra traffic
Each Adsterra macro maps to a normalized parameter, so every scored click is pinned to the right campaign, creative and publisher.
https://yoursite.com/landing?utm_source=adsterra&utm_medium=push&vv_click_id=##SUB_ID_SHORT(action)##&vv_campaign_id=##CAMPAIGN_ID##&vv_placement_id=##PLACEMENT_ID##&vv_publisher_id=##ZONE_ID##&vv_creative_id=##BANNER_ID##| Token | Adsterra macro | Maps to | Identifies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Click ID (Sub ID) | ##SUB_ID_SHORT(action)## | click_id | click |
| Campaign ID | ##CAMPAIGN_ID## | campaign_id | campaign |
| Placement ID | ##PLACEMENT_ID## | placement_id | placement |
| Zone ID | ##ZONE_ID## | publisher_id | publisher |
| Banner ID (Creative) | ##BANNER_ID## | creative_id | creative |
- Adsterra macro
##SUB_ID_SHORT(action)##- Maps to
- click_id
- Identifies
- click
- Adsterra macro
##CAMPAIGN_ID##- Maps to
- campaign_id
- Identifies
- campaign
- Adsterra macro
##PLACEMENT_ID##- Maps to
- placement_id
- Identifies
- placement
- Adsterra macro
##ZONE_ID##- Maps to
- publisher_id
- Identifies
- publisher
- Adsterra macro
##BANNER_ID##- Maps to
- creative_id
- Identifies
- creative
How the detection works.
Data points → one score
Every visit is weighed against more than a hundred independent data points and reduced to a single, sortable 0–100 quality score.
Many angles, combined
Each data point is combined rather than checked in isolation, so a genuine human almost never trips enough of them to be flagged — and bots that beat one rarely beat the rest.
Proprietary, not a black box
The detection model is ours and stays that way. What you get is a clear verdict on every visit — not a single brittle rule you can game, and not an unexplained number you can't act on.
Pinned to the source
Every verdict maps to the campaign, publisher and placement that sent the click — so you know exactly which source to cut.
How ValidVisit helps you cut fraud and bad placements on Adsterra.
Scoring and attribution are the means — the point is cutting the Adsterra traffic that wastes your spend. Here's how ValidVisit gets you a list you can act on.
- Score
See what's actually landing
You buy Adsterra clicks; what arrives are visits. ValidVisit scores each one 0–100 so real humans stand out from bots and invalid traffic — one script, no funnel hop, no fingerprinting.
- Attribute
Pin the fraud to its source
Every scored visit is tied to the exact Adsterra placement and zone via the network's own tokens — so the bad traffic has an address, not just a headline percentage.
- Cut
Take the placements off your buy
You get the worst offenders as a ready-to-use list plus postbacks to your tracker — so you can exclude them in Adsterra and put your next dollar behind the traffic that converts.
Adsterra traffic quality, answered.
Which Adsterra tokens matter most for IVT analysis, and how do I pass them?+
The two most diagnostic tokens are ##ZONE_ID## and ##PLACEMENT_ID## — they identify the publisher inventory unit generating each click and are the dimensions you will actually use to make exclusion decisions inside Adsterra. Append them to your destination URL as ValidVisit query parameters so the quality score is tied to the exact zone and placement. ##CAMPAIGN_ID## is useful for campaign-level segmentation, and ##SUB_ID_SHORT(action)## gives you the action-level click identifier for tracing click chains. No funnel hop is involved — ValidVisit reads these values on arrival and scores the visit in place.
Does ValidVisit automatically exclude bad zones from my Adsterra campaigns?+
ValidVisit is a detection and scoring tool, not an enforcement layer. Every visit receives a 0–100 quality score visible in the dashboard, and you can export the high-risk zone and placement IDs that emerge from that analysis. The exclusion step is manual: take those ##ZONE_ID## and ##PLACEMENT_ID## values and submit them as source exclusions inside your Adsterra campaign settings. That workflow keeps you in control of the decision and means you are excluding based on validated signal, not automated rules.
Adsterra's own reporting shows normal delivery — why does ValidVisit surface issues?+
Adsterra's internal reporting confirms that a click was delivered and billed within its system. ValidVisit measures what happens on your landing page after that click arrives, weighing the visit against 100+ independent data points — where the session came from, what the device behind it looks like, and how the visitor behaves on the page — and collapsing them into one 0–100 quality score. An automated session can produce a click that clears the network's delivery validation while still scoring low here, because the network it rode in on, the device it claims to be, or its behavior on arrival simply don't add up to a real human. That post-arrival layer is where ValidVisit operates, and it is orthogonal to what any network's own fraud filter measures.
Detect fraud on other push networks
Find the bots in your Adsterra spend.
See which publishers and placements send real buyers vs bots — every visit scored 0–100, worst first.
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