Abstract: There are methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for receiving an ad call from a client computing system, determining whether an instance of the ad call was previously-received, and if so, designating a first ad creative supplier associated with the previous instance of the ad call as ineligible to participate in an auction in which a second ad creative supplier is selected to serve an ad creative responsive to the ad call.

Abstract: There are methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for receiving web-based resource requests at a first computing system from a second computing system, the first computing system and a second computing system being in electronic communication through a network, each web-based resource request being defined by one or more variable-value pairs; extracting data from the web-based resource requests, the extracted data including a set of variable/value pairs that is associated with a first subset of the web-based resource requests, the set of variable/value pairs including values that have been assigned to a uniform resource locator (URL) variable; and examining the extracted data to infer a web user agent type that is a source of the first subset of the web-based resource requests

Abstract: There are methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for receiving advertisement calls at a first computing system from a second computing system, the first computing system and a second computing system being in electronic communication through a network, each advertisement call being defined by one or more variable-value pairs; extracting data from the advertisement calls, the extracted data including at least two sets of variable/value pairs, the first set of variable/value pairs including variable/value pairs of a first variable type, and the second set of variable/value pairs including variable/value pairs of a second variable type; and performing one or more tests on the extracted data to infer a legitimacy of at least a first subset of the advertisement calls.

Abstract: In an advertising serving exchange or network, in one aspect, the invention features a computer-implemented method that includes enabling a data provider to provide a content-request tracking token that associates cookie information with a user when the user visits a website. The method also includes allowing, by the data provider, at least one business entity transacting in a common domain to perform an action based on the cookie information when the user subsequently accesses the webpage. The method can also include selecting an advertisement from one of a plurality of advertisers to be placed on a webpage based on the action. In some arrangements, the data provider passes a share of the proceeds back to the website that supplied the information (e.g., the website on which the pixel was placed).