website in PopAdsValidVisit names the bad website/feed; paste it into PopAds' Blocked Websites field.
Pop-under traffic is structurally unlike any other paid channel. The impression fires the moment a publisher page loads — no click, no user intent, no intervening ad unit. That forced-load mechanic makes PopAds genuinely useful for volume-oriented campaigns, and it also concentrates a specific kind of invalid traffic: automated page-loaders that trigger the pop-under, satisfy the impression, and vanish. ValidVisit weighs each PopAds session against more than 100 independent data points — where the traffic originated, the device sitting behind it, and how the visitor actually behaves — and folds them into one 0-100 quality score per visit, so real people sail through and automated loads stand apart. The result is a publisher-level (`[WEBSITEID]`) and category-level (`[CATEGORYID]`) breakdown that shows you exactly which pockets of the network are sending real humans and which are padding your impression counter with software-generated loads.
https://yoursite.com/landing?utm_source=popads&utm_medium=pop&vv_campaign_id=[CAMPAIGNID]&vv_click_id=[IMPRESSIONID]&vv_campaign_name=[CAMPAIGNNAME]&vv_publisher_id=[WEBSITEID]&vv_placement_id=[CATEGORYID]&vv_keyword=[KEYWORD]Because a pop fires without any user gesture, the dominant IVT pattern on pop-under channels is automated browser cycling rather than the click-injection activity more common on CPC formats. A bot framework spins up a throwaway browser, loads a publisher page, the pop fires, and the session ends — all within a second or two. ValidVisit catches this because its 0-100 quality score draws on 100+ signals about the visit, and a session that loads and dies before any real human interaction has time to happen registers nothing like a genuine visitor would. Sessions that come and go this fast, concentrated on specific `[WEBSITEID]` values, are one of the clearest zone-quality tells on pop inventory.
A second pressure point is traffic routed through hosting infrastructure and tunnelled behind proxies or VPNs. PopAds inventory is organized by publisher domain, and certain domains — particularly those registered under broad entertainment or utility categories — attract volume from origins that spike during overnight windows when organic human traffic on those domains naturally recedes. Because the origin a visit comes from is one of the dimensions feeding ValidVisit's quality score, these spikes surface at the `[WEBSITEID]` dimension, so you can see which specific publisher IDs are driving the anomaly rather than writing off an entire category.
Category mismatch is a third pattern worth tracking. A publisher site categorized under a high-CPM vertical may serve negligible real audience in that niche, with the category label existing primarily to access better-paying campaigns. When a `[CATEGORYID]` delivers volume that ValidVisit consistently scores as low-quality across multiple `[WEBSITEID]` values underneath it, the category label itself is a signal worth acting on — even if individual conversion numbers from that bucket look superficially plausible.
Sort your ValidVisit report by WEBSITEID and look for publishers where the share of low-scoring visits is disproportionately high relative to your campaign-wide baseline. A handful of website IDs often account for the majority of suspect visits; identifying and manually excluding those IDs inside the PopAds campaign settings is typically the highest-leverage action available.
Pop networks route inventory partly through content category. If a CATEGORYID delivers strong raw volume but ValidVisit consistently scores the visits underneath it as low-quality — the kind of pattern you see when traffic is coming from hosting origins or tunnelled connections rather than real audiences — the category's audience signal has been inflated. Use the CATEGORYID dimension to isolate problem categories without discarding well-performing ones in the same campaign.
When a pop session loads and the visitor disappears almost instantly, that visit scores poorly across the dozens of behavioral and device signals ValidVisit weighs. A persistent run of these one-and-done sessions on a specific WEBSITEID indicates loads terminating before any meaningful human engagement, a reliable marker of automated or incentivised traffic that you should surface for manual exclusion.
Automated systems run unattended around the clock. A publisher whose ValidVisit scores degrade sharply during overnight hours — well above your own campaign baseline for those hours — is a strong candidate for dayparting exclusion or deeper review rather than blanket removal, since the same publisher may deliver legitimate traffic during active human hours.
Each PopAds macro maps to a normalized parameter, so every scored click is pinned to the right campaign, creative and publisher.
| Token | PopAds macro | Maps to | Identifies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Campaign ID | [CAMPAIGNID] | campaign_id | campaign |
| Impression ID (Click ID / External ID) | [IMPRESSIONID] | click_id | click |
| Campaign Name | [CAMPAIGNNAME] | campaign_name | campaign |
| Website ID | [WEBSITEID] | publisher_id | publisher |
| Category ID | [CATEGORYID] | placement_id | placement |
| Keyword | [KEYWORD] | keyword | keyword |
[CAMPAIGNID][IMPRESSIONID][CAMPAIGNNAME][WEBSITEID][CATEGORYID][KEYWORD]PopAdsitself 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 PopAds tokens, not by creative (which says nothing about whether a click was human).
Illustrative example — PopAds traffic scored 0–100 per sub-source, worst first.
See your own PopAds sub-sources scored this way.
Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
[WEBSITEID]ID of the publisher website/source that triggered the popunder.Bot / invalid-traffic score broken down by:
[CATEGORYID]ID of the category of the traffic-source website (used to segment/target placements).Per-click id: PopAds passes a unique click id, so we also run velocity, deduplication and repeat-source checks on every click.
Compare bot & invalid-traffic breakdown across every ad network →Every click is weighed against more than a hundred independent data points and reduced to a single, sortable 0–100 quality score.
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.
The detection model is ours and stays that way. What you get is a clear verdict on every click — not a single brittle rule you can game, and not an unexplained number you can't act on.
Every verdict maps to the campaign, publisher and placement that sent the click — so you know exactly which source to cut.
After you add ValidVisit's landing-page script and append the PopAds macros to your destination URL, every pop session is measured against 100+ independent data points — the origin it arrived from, the device behind it, and the way the visitor behaves — which collapse into a single 0-100 quality score per visit, so genuine humans pass and bots stand out. ValidVisit attributes that score to the specific `[WEBSITEID]` and `[CATEGORYID]` that delivered the session. You then review the report, identify which publisher IDs and categories show a disproportionate share of low-scoring visits, and manually exclude those sub-sources inside the PopAds campaign dashboard. ValidVisit surfaces the data; the exclusion action stays in your hands inside the network's own interface.
The most diagnostic dimensions for pop-under IVT are `[WEBSITEID]` (the publisher domain serving the pop) and `[CATEGORYID]` (the content category the publisher registered under). Append both to your landing page URL — for example `?ppsite=[WEBSITEID]&ppcat=[CATEGORYID]` — and ValidVisit stores them alongside every visit score. You can also pass `[CAMPAIGNID]` and `[IMPRESSIONID]` for deduplication and campaign-level segmentation. Because pop impressions do not carry a user-chosen click, `[WEBSITEID]` is the primary handle for isolating bot-heavy supply; `[KEYWORD]` and `[CAMPAIGNNAME]` are useful for filtering your report view but rarely differentiate IVT patterns on their own.
PopAds' internal quality controls are calibrated to protect the network's overall publisher relationships and billing thresholds — not to your specific offer, geo, or funnel. Traffic that clears the network's detection threshold can still score poorly once ValidVisit weighs it against its own 100+ data points on your landing page: a visit that arrives from a suspect origin, behaves nothing like a person, and exits before any real engagement is something no network-side filter is positioned to catch on your behalf, and ValidVisit only scores it after the click has already arrived. More practically, PopAds' own reporting shows aggregate metrics per campaign, not per-publisher quality breakdowns tied to your own conversion data. ValidVisit gives you `[WEBSITEID]`-level visibility into which publishers are dragging your optimization data — so your exclusion decisions are grounded in what those publishers do to your funnel, not what the network's global averages suggest.
See which campaigns and publishers send real, converting traffic vs bots — every click scored 0–100.
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