Introduction
What is an audience?
An audience is a group that uses the cookie IDs assigned by the advertising media.
What is audience exclusion?
When Spider AF detects invalid traffic (ad fraud), the user is added to an audience list for exclusion on the media side. This prevents that user from seeing your ads in the future.
The Spider AF tag fires when users arrive at your landing page, allowing us to determine whether the traffic is valid. As we detect invalid traffic, we continually update the audience list to block it.
Audience exclusion only affects invalid traffic, so you don't need to worry about any impact on normal users.
For more information on the types of invalid traffic that Spider AF can detect, see How we detect invalid traffic.
Audience exclusion flow
Audience exclusion generally works as follows:
A user arrives after clicking an ad.
The Spider AF tag fires.
The audience tag fires for invalid traffic.
Spider AF adds the invalid user to the audience for exclusion.
The ad network updates their list for exclusion.
Ads are not delivered to the excluded audience. Ads are delivered as usual to normal users.