ValidVisit vs Opticks

Opticks is built to act. It detects an invalid source and then works through platform integrations to stop that source reaching your campaigns — the value being that the loop closes without you touching the account. That is a genuine capability and one ValidVisit does not have: we never block, never auto-exclude, and never write to your ad account.

What ValidVisit produces instead is an attributed record. Each visit earns a 0–100 quality score from 100+ independent data points, and each score is pinned to the campaign, source and sub-source behind it. The output is a Valid / Suspect / Invalid breakdown per source, which you review and apply yourself in the network’s own dashboard. The trade-off is straightforward and worth stating plainly: Opticks saves you the manual step; ValidVisit gives you evidence you own, can audit, and can disagree with. Where a prevention system decides on your behalf, ours hands you the reasoning — each verdict names the exact checks the visit failed.

Opticks spans native, search, social and affiliate, and the affiliate side in particular is a distinct problem with its own fraud patterns. If policing an affiliate programme is part of the job, that is squarely Opticks territory and not something we cover — worth being direct about rather than implying parity.

ValidVisit is narrower on purpose. We score paid-media visits and attribute them per campaign, source and sub-source, using the same dimensions the networks already report on, so a quality score lines up against your spend without a translation step. That focus is what lets us go deep on the sub-source question — which specific publisher, zone or placement inside a source is carrying the invalid volume — rather than broad across programme types. If your spend is concentrated in paid channels and the question is which sub-source is costing me quality, the narrower tool answers it more precisely. If your exposure spans affiliate as well, the broader one covers more ground.

Detection that feeds prevention generally needs to identify a device precisely enough to keep it out, and that tends to lean on device fingerprinting and persistent identity signals. ValidVisit is fingerprint-free by design: we score the behaviour and context of a visit rather than building a durable profile of the person behind it.

That is a real product constraint and it costs us something. There is a tier of premium proxy fraud that identity-heavy platforms may catch and we deliberately do not chase, and we would rather say so than overclaim. What it buys you is a detection layer you can put in front of privacy-conscious audiences and stricter data regimes without inheriting a fingerprinting liability. For organisations where data minimisation is a hard requirement, that is often the deciding factor. For those who simply want the widest possible identity net, an identity-first platform will suit better — and running both is a perfectly reasonable answer, with Opticks preventing and ValidVisit supplying the independent scorecard.