The humanness pyramid is a methodology to detect whether an ad impression was served to a bot (score of 0) or to a human (score of 100). This helps advertisers better optimize their ads for business impact and ROI because any ad served to a bot will never convert into a paying customer.

1. Augustine Fou- 1 -
Humanness
Pyramid
Dr. Augustine Fou <acfou @ mktsci.com>
http://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
November 2013

2. Augustine Fou- 2 -
Humanness Pyramid
server-side calls to URL; no
browser (user agent)
browser with user agent and other
detectable parameters
has javascript and JS actions like
calculations and functions on the page
typical human actions like mouse movement,
clicks, scroll (advanced bots can fake this)
bots that can solve captchas, simulate human
actions on page, keep cookies
Most likely to be human
joint actions like click in text box before typing,
move mouse to ad and then click
0
10
20
40
80
100
score

3. Augustine Fou- 3 -
Level 0 – server scripts
Scripts on the
server side that
load specific
URLs to see if
they are “up”
These don’t
usually pass User
Agent
information.

4. Augustine Fou- 4 -
Level 1 – browsers
Actual browsers which
show User Agent info:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows
NT 6.1; WOW64)
AppleWebKit/537.36
(KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/35.0.1916.114
Safari/537.36

5. Augustine Fou- 5 -
Level 2 – can execute JS
Has and can execute javascript – in this
case, we made the JS do a calculation;
with JS the bots can cause ads to load

6. Augustine Fou- 6 -
Level 3 – mouse movement
Mouse movement
and page scrolling
used to be a
reliable indicator
that the user was a
human. But even
these actions can
now be faked.
Demo here:
http://actupon.tv/webspy/
See AdAge: “How Bots Scam Advertisers By Pretending to be Human”

7. Augustine Fou- 7 -
Level 4 – joint actions
Human users usually have to move the mouse to a
text box and place the cursor before typing

8. Augustine Fou- 8 -
Level 5 – solve CAPTCHAs
Human users click and drag items or type in a phrase
to solve CAPTCHAs to prove they are human.
Drag and drop action Type-in Ad

9. Augustine Fou- 9 -
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Augustine Fou- 9 -

10. Augustine Fou- 10 -
Dr. Augustine Fou – Digital Consigliere
“I advise clients on optimizing advertising
across all channels. Using insights and fast-
feedback loops from digital, we can not only
target brand ads better, but we can shift
towards more detailed measurement and
ROI; this includes detecting and mitigating
fraud and waste.”
FORMER CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, HCG (OMNICOM)
MCKINSEY CONSULTANT
CLIENT SIDE / AGENCY SIDE EXPERIENCE
PROFESSOR AND COLUMNIST
ENTREPRENEUR / SMALL BUSINESS OWNER
PHD MATERIALS SCIENCE (MIT '95) AT AGE 23
@acfou
ClickZ Articles: http://bit.ly/augustine-fou-clickz
Slideshares: http://bit.ly/augustine-fou-slideshares
LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/augustinefou