Building a Traffic Trading/Skim Script
 

I've been building a traffic trading script for a TGP network I'm working on, but there were a couple of things I don?t quite understand so was hoping a few of the guys who understand the mechanics of some of the existing scripts might be able to help. :)

1. When people set up a trade, and they send you (using easy numbers) 50 raw clicks and only 40 of them are unique, are they expecting;
   a. Just 50 raw clicks back or;
   b. 50 raw with 40 unique back or;
   c. Just 40 unique back?
   This is probably the one I?m most worried about as I don?t want to be sending too few or too many clicks back because my logic is wrong.
2. When logging clicks to galleries, is every click logged? Or just the ones that skim out? Either way, if you have a network with say 20,000 hits each day, and each one is clicking away at say 15 galleries, the size of the archive database is going to be going up by 300,000 rows each day, which seems like a lot.. Is this how everyone does it, or is there better way to process this?
3. I've seen 'Productivity' calculated a few different ways, both with raw clicks and unique clicks, which do you think is the best way to measure it?
4. Is a skim of say 60% calculated just by a random number between 0, 60? Or is there a better way of doing this?
5. Do you recommend dropping any clicks that look like bots and not logging them, or is there better way not to leak traffic?
6. It seems like most trade scripts work off 24 hour windows, so what is the best way to handle a situation where a site may have sent 50 clicks and you have only sent 40 back by the end of the day? Should this 'debt' roll over to the next day or just reset?

I'm sure I'll have more questions as I think about it but, hopefully some people can help me out or at least point me in the right direction, once I understand this stuff building it is easy, but I just want to get it right the first time. :)

Thanks!

Here are some of my answers that could be useful.

1. They don't know what to expect. They could send 40 unique clicks and get back 10 or 20 or 30 or 40. This depends a lot on the productivity of sites. It is important to track how many site clicks are created by the incoming raw and unique hits. You could have 40 incoming unique hits that created 50 clicks on the site or 40 incoming unique hits that created 100 clicks on the site. What is the productivity of the trader... 100% or 150% or 200%. Usually, the traffic trade script is setup to send back more traffic to the trader that creates more clicks. However, the script can be setup in different ways. For whatever reasons, the traders can be ranked by most clicks, most incoming uniques or most incoming raws. If a site has a lot more traffic coming from search engines or other sources, they could be sending back a lot more traffic back to trades then they received from trades. If the trade script sees one person going to the site and making like 100 clicks, it could be considered a hit bot.

2. They click to galleries. Whatever amount of traffic went to galleries is what would be logged for galleries, wouldn't it. I mean you could have 20% or 50% traffic going to trades or whatever.

3. A good way to calculate could be to stop counting clicks after a unique person clicks more than 5 times.

4. A lot of traders have rules like, minimum 50% or 60% or 70%. Whatever you set your skim %, it depends if you want to follow their rules or not. A lower % traffic sent to galleries could create more traffic that would make your total site traffic grow faster.

5. Take a look at the latest technologies that exist to detect bots. Maybe they thought of something more.

6. I don't think it should roll over to the next day. Keep it at 24 hours. Really, if your site doesn't have enough traffic to send back then it just doesn't have enough. The scripts really are made to react fast to more traffic sent in 5 minutes, 10 minutes or within hours.