Traffic Control
There are times when traffic sources on a campaign may be exactly what the advertiser is looking for and sometimes the traffic is not hitting the KPIs of a campaign. With Traffic Control you can choose to Allow or Block various types of traffic sources. This is also sometimes known as blacklisting and whitelisting. With traffic control, if you want to allow traffic from specific Sub IDs or from App Names you can do that. Maybe you want to block low-performing Sub sub IDs you can do that here as well. Let's go step by step in configuring your Traffic Control Rule:
How To Configure a Traffic Control Rule
Go to Traffic > Control
Click + Create Traffic Control Rule
Filter which Offers, Advertiser, or Publisher the rule is being configured for
💡Tip: Leaving these empty will create a global traffic control rule
Choose what Field you are controlling:
App ID
App Name
Creative
Placement
Site
Sub ID
Sub sub ID
Choose the Type of Control:
Block - blacklisting
Allow - whitelisting
Input the Values you are controlling
❗Important: Values are separated by a comma instead of a space so that you can type out values like app names that may have a space.
❗Important: If you choose to Allow (whitelisting) and input values here, then any other values not matching these will be blacklisted by default.
Optional: Choose a reason for the traffic control rule
Click Save
Conditional Values
If you want to target values that start with, end with, or contain a value, use the wildcard '%' symbol.
For example:
%+Value - %1234 - will check any values ending with 1234
Values+% - 1234% - will check any values starting with 1234
%+Values+% - %1234% - will check any value that contains 1234
Managing Traffic Control
How to Remove a Rule
If you are no longer in need of a specific rule or want to remove multiple configured rules you do so from Traffic > Control or from a specific Offer, Advertiser, Publisher page.
Under Traffic > Control you can search and filter for your rule. Then either press the Trashcan Icon to delete the one rule or select multiple and click Remove Rules at the top of the table.
On any entity page, you can scroll down to the tab section and then click the Traffic Tab, and then Control. Here you can see any Traffic Control Rule that is configured for this entity. You can add or remove rules for that entity here.
What Happens to Blocked Traffic
When your Traffic Control Rule is blocking or allowing a specific source of traffic, whether it be an App Name or a Sub ID. That click will be blocked and discarded. This is of course if you have an active Optimization Rule set up for Click (or/and for impression) called Traffic Control. By default, this is set to 'active' unless you have made any changes since using Swaarm for the first time. That discarded click can be used on Smart Links to capitalize the most on your traffic.
Who Made This Rule?
Mistakes happen, so in case you find some traffic being blocked or only allowed and you are wondering who or when was a rule configured. You can go over to Audits and check out who and when the rule was created.
How to check which discarded clicks/ impressions were from Traffic Control?
In the Explorer reporting tool, you can split by an Evaluation Dimension called Failed Click Rules/ Failed Impressions Rules. Whenever a click/ impression is blocked/discarded because of a Traffic Control rule you will see the reason Traffic_Control.
You can add the dimension Failed Click Subrules/ Failed Impression Subrules to then identify the Traffic Control Rule ID to understand which rule is blocking/discarding the traffic.
