Patent ID: 8880541

Claim:
A method to assist detection of invalid clicks in network content site activity, the method comprising: obtaining first and second historic click quality characterizations for a network content site for respective first and second time periods, wherein each of the first and second historic click quality characterizations is based on a comparison of clickthroughs and clickpasts and is obtained for each of the first and second time periods by: receiving a clickpast threshold value that is determined based on at least one of: (i) an average page depth of visits during the respective time period, (ii) an average page length of visits, and (iii) an average distribution of visits among different landing pages in a campaign, determining a respective number of clickpasts for at least one content page for the respective time period, wherein each clickpast comprises a respective network content site visit involving clicking a respective number of pages past the at least one content page that is greater than the clickpast threshold value, wherein the respective number of clickpasts comprises at least one of (i) a respective number of unique pages clicked past the at least one content page and (ii) a respective number of successively deeper pages in the network content site clicked past the at least one content page, and comparing the respective number of clickpasts with a respective number of clickthroughs for the at least one content page during the respective time period to obtain the historic click quality characterization; and identifying a click quality anomaly based on a difference between the first and second historic click quality characterizations exceeding at least one of (i) a p-value indicative of a reliability of at least one of the first and second historic click quality characterizations and (ii) a standard deviation for at least one of the first and second historic click quality characterization.