Every month, as a blogger, you receive a report that breaks down the revenue you earned in the previous month, along with important traffic statistics. These reports are typically created and sent out around the 20th of each month. The reports are distributed via email by our Google Advertising Manager. They provide valuable insights by including Gross and Net revenue figures, as well as Page Views and Session data for each month. To generate accurate revenue reports, we rely on data from our supply-side platform reports, which help us identify the specific sources of revenue.

It's important to note that revenue is not calculated based on ad requests alone, but on delivered ad impressions. This means that only the actual ads that were displayed to users contribute to your revenue.

To ensure transparency and integrity in our advertising ecosystem, we have adopted Google's best practices for detecting and filtering invalid traffic. Our goal is to identify and filter out both general and sophisticated forms of invalid traffic using data-based identifiers, activities, and patterns. This includes non-human traffic and suspected traffic fraud. However, it's important to acknowledge that not all invalid traffic can be proactively identified and excluded from the reported results, as it's sometimes challenging to determine user intent or distinguish human activity from non-human activity.

Google Advertising Manager maintains ad logs that are instrumental in identifying invalid events and non-human traffic. These logs go through a rigorous filtration process to produce aggregated ad impression files.

During the filtration process, certain log entries are removed if they represent situations other than usable log entries. This includes entries where the server did not understand the request or assigned an error code status to the request. Additionally, incomplete or corrupted log entries are also filtered out. Our partner's processing requires specific fields to be present, complete, and accurate in the log entries. Any entries lacking or containing incorrect information are rejected.

Non-human traffic consists of various programmatic activities on websites, such as robots, spiders, crawlers, and agents. These programs make requests for web pages and follow links within the website, often including links to ad servers. Non-human traffic can also include system monitoring tools and content indexing or retrieving processes used by search engines. When a user's browser or robot makes a request to a server, it provides certain data, including IP address and user agent information. We leverage this data, particularly the user agent, which contains details about the browser type, version, and operating system, to filter out non-human traffic.