How can i block frod image requests?

[Former Community Member]

Hello!

Now Adobe Analytics receives img requests from a site from which I do not want to collect data. These requests consume call servers. What are the mechanisms for blocking img requests so as not to consume call servers?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I'm not sure.. I've never had to do such a thing.. but if the img requests are coming from a domain you don't own / can't control (and therefore can't remove them); then you may have to reach out to ClientCare.. since the tracking server is controlled by Adobe... it's not like you can create rules to reject certain calls....

Good luck! If you do get a solution, please post it back here so that others can benefit.

[yuhuisg]

Assuming that the fraudulent calls are coming from a website that has copied your website, then the most common method is at your tracking implementation level. Before sending the beacon/image request, check if the current web page is from your website's domain.

If your fraudulent calls are coming from bots that are visiting your website, then unfortunately, there's really not much that you can do. @lukas_oldenburg has some rants and recommendations at his blog https://lukas-oldenburg.medium.com/bots-analytics-common-failing-approaches-to-bot-filtering-incl-ai...

[Former Community Member]

@yuhuisg Requests come from another site. How can I verify that a request is being sent from my site at the tracking implementation level?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

IF the calls are not hardcoded, and are using your Launch implementation, you can use a condition on your rule.

So let's say your domain is "mydomain.com" and the bad domain is "garbage.com"

In Adobe Launch, you should have configured your domains in the property settings:

(add mydomain.com here)

In your rules, you can add a condition:

You can choose all your single domain (or multiple domains like I have, if this implementation covers more than one site)

This should only return "true" if the tracking call is coming from the selected domains...(i.e. mydomain.com any other valid domains your are tracking).

The actions (set variables, send beacon, etc) will only run if this condition returns true.

But again, this only works IF the tracking call is using your Adobe Launch file.

[leocwlau]

No, an image request is the most fundament thing sending data into Adobe Analytics that what you can do is remove them from the website you mentioned.

The only way to stop tracking from happening after the image request is the 'Exclude By Cookie/IP address' function under admin, assuming those image requests are kind of bot activities and coming from some pre-defined IP addresses.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Right, the link posted goes to "hardcoded" image requests.. like what you would put onto newsletters or other sites that can't use scripting languages... there is no Adobe Launch "middle layer" to create exclusion rules... and by the time it gets to processing rules its too late (at least from a cost perspective).

However, excluding by IP probably won't work... the IP address would be the user's IP (not the domain posting the image), so any user hitting that page would have a different IP address. Plus, even if you could identify that, you still get charged for those hits (this feature is to exclude your internal traffic from reporting, but the tracking data is still stored in the raw data).

[VaniBhemarasetty · Accepted solution]

@Deleted Account Only solution to this, remove the tag from the unwanted pages. Otherwise, if you do not want to report the data in analytics, you can do Exclude by IP address method to not get the hits reported, but these server calls will be billed

If in case you are implementing Adobe analytics through launch, you put a condition in you are page load rule to not load on these pages, so that server calls do not fire on those pages

[Former Community Member]

@VaniBhemarasetty Thank you for the answer!