Checklist: Kill duplicate clicks inflating your cost

Checklist: Kill duplicate clicks inflating your cost

A smartlink's reporting showed 11% more clicks than the tracker. Duplicates from back-button and refresh were double-counting and double-routing.

What we did:
☐ Step 1: Compare click count: smartlink 100k vs tracker 90k — 10k phantom clicks.
☐ Step 2: Add a dedup rule keyed on IP + user-agent + 30-minute window.
☐ Step 3: Route deduped repeats to a cached "already seen" page, not a fresh offer hit.
☐ Step 4: Re-fire the offer postback only on the first unique click.

Outcome over 14 days: phantom clicks dropped from 11% to 1.2%. Reported EPC corrected upward from $0.20 to $0.22 because real conversions now divided by real clicks. Offer-side rejection complaints stopped.

Repeat weekly: reconcile smartlink click count vs tracker; gap over 3% means a dedup leak.