Using Hitprobe
Before reading on, make sure you've followed Hitprobe's onboarding or these docs to add our tag to your website, and connected your ad accounts (if you want to exclude traffic from your ad campaigns).
We'll give a quick rundown of all the key concepts in Hitprobe and help you to dig into more detailed information in the areas you're interested in.
Basic concepts
What it does
Hitprobe works by collecting deep data about your website traffic and presenting it either in aggregated form as analytics, or as a list of sessions. You can switch freely and instantly between analytics and sessions, for deep analysis.
You can then set up automated actions, such as excluding poor quality traffic from ad campaigns.
Collecting data
Data is collected via a tag (a client-side JavaScript snippet), alongside a Google certified click tracker that allows every click to be tracked, every time.
The data includes a fingerprint, which is a unique identifier for the web browser being used to access your site, and is designed to persist even if the visitor tries evasion techniques such as using a VPN or changing to private browsing.
Using the data
A large number of datapoints are available, covering risk, engagement, and more general characteristics of the visitor.
In addition, both a risk level and engagement level is assessed for each visit. The risk level represents the likelihood of the visit being suspicious or invalid (i.e. scrapers, click fraud, bad actors), and the engagement level shows how much interaction with the website occurred (i.e. bounced, engaged, or converted).
Saving views
Both analytics and sessions views can be filtered to show a subset of traffic of interest (i.e. visits last week, from Meta, with an invalid risk level). A saved view can then be created from these filters to provide fast access directly to filtered traffic over any time period.
Excluding traffic
Another important use of saved views is to exclude traffic from seeing ads in the future. Any shared saved view can be set to exclude the visit through audience exclusion (adding the visitor to an ad network's exclusion audience), or by adding the IP, network (ISP), or the referring domain name to Google's exclusion lists. This is known as click fraud protection.
Hitprobe provides some default views out of the box, already configured to exclude risky paid ad traffic.
Of course, before you can exclude traffic in your ad campaigns you'll need to connect one or more channels.
Other actions
There are other actions available from saved views to help you to identify and respond to risky traffic.