Question

59

Determine which advertisement made a request to /eyeblaster/addineyev2.html

rated 0 times [ 64] [ 5] / answers: 1 / hits: 26836 / 12 Years ago, mon, november 19, 2012, 12:00:00

I have a large website that is using two large online advertisement Remnant providers. These providers are such that they start and stop ad campaigns on a regular basis that run on our website.

One of the ads coming from one of the providers is incorrectly making a request to:

/eyeblaster/addineyev2.html

I have determined that the file being requested is used by some websites when the ads on the website are served via iframes. This file in theory would circumvent the cross domain restrictions so that the ad provider could resize the iframe using javascript within the iframe.

I determined this use of the file by stumbling upon this support document:

http://support.google.com/dfp_premium/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1085693

My problem is that our websites do not use iframes to deliver advertisements, so the requests going to the /eyeblaster/addineyev2.html URI results in a 404 error, and is unnecessary. Because the error is coming from a large vendor-provided CMS the error renders with our Google Analytics tracking code on it. This has the result of inflating our apparent pageviews.

The pageview inflation can be very severe, because the 404 error page also contains ads. That 404 page could also load the faulty ad, resulting in a recursive loop of ads loading the exact same /eyeblaster/addineyev2.html 404 page.

I have thus far been unable to witness an ad making a direct request to this url via Firebug or similar developer tools. Yet, the traffic to this non-existent page is gigantic so the offending ad is certainly still in the mix. The problem is that I cannot figure out which ad is broken, so I can't tell our remnant providers to remove it. Both vendors are feigning ignorance of the issue.

I cannot remove the Google tracking code on the 404 error page, but I can add additional JavaScript to the page.

Is there any way that I could identify the ad causing a request to /eyeblaster/addineyev2.html by adding some javascript to the 404 error that results when trying to request that page inside an iframe?

Essentially almost a frame buster script that instead of busting the frame, gives information on the HTML nodes nearby the iframe element? I think it's mildly possible, but I'm not seeing a clear path at the moment.

Thanks!

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claudiofredye

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2 Years ago

answered 12 Years ago clarkulisesa · Accepted Answer

To avoid that unwanted tracking you should place a dummy empty file on /eyeblaster/addineyev2.html, or, if you use nginx do something like

server {

  ...



  location = /eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html { echo ; }

}

or, better

server {

  ...



  location = /eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html { return 404 404 - page not found;}

}

If you don`t have static hosting and cannot configure a proxy server you can put a condition in your 404 page tracking via javascript

if (document.URL.indexOf('/eyeblaster/addineyeV2.html') == -1) {

   doAnalyticsTracking();

}