Q. How does Smartbuild know if the clicks on my listing are genuine ?

Smartbuild uses a combination of proprietary technology and best practice methods to track the clicks your business listing receives.

Smartbuild continually reviews the activity on the site and performs regular updates to our click tracking technology as necessary.

Some of the measures we currently use are:

Tracking the IP address of every user.

Tracking the Browser ID of every user.

Tracking the Session ID of every user.

Tracking the Visitor ID of every user.

Smartbuild also use custom built algorithms that cross check our data to identify invalid and duplicate clicks.

IP address
Every machine on the internet has a unique identifying number called an IP (Internet Protocol) Address. To make it easier for us humans to remember an IP address, they are normally expressed in decimal format as a "dotted decimal number" like this: 216.27.61.137

Browser ID
A sample Browser ID (also known as HTTP User Agent) looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nl; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051107 Firefox/1.5

Smartbuild uses the browser ID to detect if the visitor is using a normal web browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, or is a robot or search engine crawler or spider (such as GoogleBot, MSNBot etc). The browser ID is commonly used to check and detect the browser and version used. This information is then be used to output any customised html code and content.

Session ID
A session ID is a unique number that a website server assigns to a specific user for the duration of that users visit (or session). The session ID is then stored as a cookie, form field, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Some web servers generate the session ID by simply incrementing static numbers. However Smartbuild's web server uses algorithms that involve a more complex method including factoring in the date, time and duration of the visit along with other variables to assist in identifying legitimate users.

Visitor ID
Most websites including Smartbuild determine how many people actually visit the site by using what is called a cookie. Websites do this by setting a cookie with a unique ID on each visitors computer (Visitor ID).

Cookies typically look like this: WEAT CC=NC%5FRaleigh%2DDurham®ION= www.msn.com/

Websites typically use cookies:

To maintain session data (ie. remembering your preferences and selections)

Identify new visitors and returning visitors to measure visitor loyalty and to remember returning visitors.

To auto-fill repetetive information for returning visitors, ie. username or email address when logging in to a site.

It's also used to track what the visitor is doing while they are on the site, including adding items to a shopping cart. Each item you add to your shopping cart is stored in the website's database along with your visitor ID. When you check out, the site knows what is in your cart by retrieving all your selections from the database and cross checking them to your visitor ID. It would be impossible to implement a convenient shopping experience without using something like a cookie.