NativeWhich MGID publishers send real traffic?
Not all MGID traffic is equal. ValidVisit scores every visit 0–100 and pins it to the exact publisher that sent it — so you can tell real humans from bots and invalid clicks, worst publishers first.
widget in MGIDBuyer checks the offending widget UIDs in the Widget optimization tab and clicks the pause/stop icon to exclude them, or bulk-uploads a CSV of UIDs via Import → Widget Blocklist (max 1,000 widgets per import).
ValidVisit reports the device, OS, browser — down to the version — plus the language and ISP behind every flagged visit, and MGID supports OS version, browser, language, device type and connection type targeting. The segments we flag are segments you can exclude.
How invalid traffic slips in through MGID publishers.
Native discovery networks like MGID distribute your ads across a sprawling ecosystem of independent publishers, each surfacing teasers inside content-recommendation widgets embedded on third-party sites. The power of that model is reach; the vulnerability is that publisher quality varies enormously, and the network's CPC mechanics create a structural incentive for certain publishers to maximize clicks rather than advertiser outcomes. ValidVisit attaches a lightweight scoring script to your MGID destination URL and judges every arriving visit against more than 100 independent data points — covering the network the click came through, the device sitting behind it, and the way the visitor actually behaves — which collapse into one transparent 0-100 quality score per visit, so real people sail through and automated traffic stands apart. Each score is tied to MGID's own widget_id and click_id tokens. No funnel hop is involved and no landing page request is altered; scoring happens post-arrival so your page load and Quality Score signals are untouched. The result is a per-widget, per-publisher breakdown you can use to decide which placements to exclude manually inside MGID's dashboard — grounded in your own independent data, not the network's aggregate reporting.
MGID's publisher ecosystem is wide and heterogeneous, which means invalid traffic rarely distributes evenly — it concentrates in a small number of publisher placements where the economics favor volume over quality. The dominant pattern in native widget inventory is publisher arbitrage: a site owner drives low-cost traffic from outside sources to inflate the pageviews on which widget impressions are counted, then collects CPCs when those visitors — or bots standing in for them — click teasers. Because MGID pays on the click, not the downstream conversion, the damage to an advertiser's budget can accumulate across dozens of widget_id values before post-click engagement metrics make the pattern visible.
A second pressure comes from automated click generation run out of rented server farms, which lands as low quality scores because the underlying network and device characteristics simply do not line up with a genuine human on a consumer connection. These sweeps tend to hit a single widget_id in bursts rather than distributing naturally across a campaign's placement mix. A third, less common pattern is competitive or incentivized clicking on specific placements where a publisher has an unusual stake in click volume; ValidVisit surfaces this as a concentration of clicks whose behavioral and technical signals are inconsistent with organic content discovery, pulling their quality scores well below the campaign baseline — though inferring intent from signal patterns alone is not definitive.
What to watch on MGID
A well-distributed MGID campaign spreads clicks across many widget placements. When a small number of widget_id values account for a disproportionate share of total click volume — particularly with quality scores running below your campaign average — those publisher placements warrant manual review and potential exclusion in MGID's dashboard before the imbalance compounds.
Bot operators running click farms on rented infrastructure show up with network and device traits that don't match real consumer visitors. If a specific widget_id is generating clicks that consistently land in the low end of the quality scale, that is a strong signal the traffic is non-human — ValidVisit ties that score to the widget and click_id so you can take the finding directly to MGID's account team.
ValidVisit grades each arriving visit on its own merits, independent of which placement sent it. When a particular widget_id shows a materially higher share of low-scoring visits than the rest of the campaign, it suggests a portion of that traffic is automated rather than people genuinely engaging with the page — a pattern distinct from poor audience fit and more consistent with machine-driven clicking.
Some publishers with a high invalid-traffic profile enter a campaign rotation at low volume to stay under automated thresholds, then ramp spend quickly once a pattern is established. Watch for widget_id values that appear for the first time and immediately generate click velocity well above established placements, especially outside the target geography's peak hours.
Pinpoint the bot publishers & placements in MGID.
MGID 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 MGID tokens, not by creative (which says nothing about whether a click was human).
Bought as one MGID line, your spend is a single number. Scored per sub-source it runs from 93 down to 25 — the worst is nearly all bots. That’s the leak a blended average hides.
MGID traffic scored 0–100 per sub-source, worst first — down to the placement you buy.
Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
- Widget (Publisher)
{widget_id}
Per-click id: MGID 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 MGID sub-sources scored this way.
How ValidVisit attributes MGID traffic
Each MGID 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=mgid&utm_medium=native&vv_campaign_id={campaign_id}&vv_creative_id={teaser_id}&vv_publisher_id={widget_id}&vv_click_id={click_id}| Token | MGID macro | Maps to | Identifies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Campaign ID | {campaign_id} | campaign_id | campaign |
| Teaser (Creative) | {teaser_id} | creative_id | creative |
| Widget (Publisher) | {widget_id} | publisher_id | publisher |
| Click ID | {click_id} | click_id | click |
- MGID macro
{campaign_id}- Maps to
- campaign_id
- Identifies
- campaign
- MGID macro
{teaser_id}- Maps to
- creative_id
- Identifies
- creative
- MGID macro
{widget_id}- Maps to
- publisher_id
- Identifies
- publisher
- MGID macro
{click_id}- Maps to
- click_id
- Identifies
- click
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 widgets on MGID.
Scoring and attribution are the means — the point is cutting the MGID 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 MGID 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 MGID widget and zone via the network's own tokens — so the bad traffic has an address, not just a headline percentage.
- Cut
Take the widgets 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 MGID and put your next dollar behind the traffic that converts.
MGID traffic quality, answered.
Does ValidVisit work with MGID's tracking tokens, or do I need custom setup?+
MGID supports dynamic value insertion on destination URLs, so you can append widget_id and click_id as query parameters that MGID populates automatically on every click. ValidVisit reads those values on arrival and ties each quality score to the originating widget and the unique click event. Adding campaign_id gives you cross-campaign segmentation at the widget level — useful if the same widget_id appears in multiple campaigns with different targeting. The teaser_id (creative) is available but bot-driven patterns live in the publisher layer, not in which creative was displayed, so it is lower priority for IVT analysis.
MGID has its own traffic quality layer — what does ValidVisit add?+
MGID's internal quality filtering operates on signals the network controls and is applied before clicks reach your URL. ValidVisit runs independently on your side of the click, after arrival, and scores each event against 100-plus data points the network does not have visibility into — spanning the path the click traveled, the device behind it, and how the visitor behaves on your page. That independence matters when you need auditable, per-visit evidence to support a placement exclusion decision or a credit conversation: you are presenting your own data, not asking the network to review its own reporting.
What does 'manually exclude' mean in practice once ValidVisit flags a widget?+
ValidVisit identifies which widget_id values carry low quality scores and surfaces them in your dashboard alongside the click volume and signal breakdown. You then take that widget_id into MGID's publisher exclusion controls — available in the campaign settings — and add it to the placement blocklist. ValidVisit does not push exclusions to MGID automatically; the action lives in the network dashboard. That manual step keeps you in control of what gets blocked and gives you a clear audit trail if you need to dispute charges or request make-goods.
Detect fraud on other native networks
Find the bots in your MGID spend.
See which publishers and placements send real buyers vs bots — every visit scored 0–100, worst first.
Free trial at launch · just your email
One script · no cookies · no fingerprinting · raw IP never stored