The bot filtering is the part I'd look at first. On our job board every redirect to the original posting counts as an application, and for a while a big share of those clicks came from cloud servers, Google Cloud and AWS, sending a normal desktop Chrome user agent. Our UA list missed all of it; what finally worked was checking the click IP against data center ranges. Does Snipzr decide a click is a bot from the user agent alone or from where it comes from too, and can I see how many clicks it dropped?
Thanks for the sharp question, and for sharing what worked on your job board.
Snipzr looks at both: the user agent and where the click comes from. A click from a cloud or hosting network, like AWS or Google Cloud, counts as automated when it doesn't behave like a real browser or arrives in bursts, so people browsing through a VPN or company network aren't mistaken for bots. We never store the IP.
Nothing is dropped: each link shows its human clicks plus "+ N not counted as human", broken down by reason, in the dashboard, API and CSV, on every plan.
Full rules: snipzr.com/docs/analytics/how-we-count. If you'd like to compare notes on your data-center check, or there's anything your job board needs, we'd love to hear from you at [email protected].
Snipzr Team
@SnipzrHQ the VPN and company network point is where our version is cruder. We drop data center ranges outright, so an employer behind a corporate proxy that happens to run on AWS would disappear from the count, and we would never know. Keeping the excluded clicks visible by reason seems like the safer default. How much traffic does a new link need before the burst check can tell a crawler from a team opening the same link in a meeting?
@spinhire No warm-up needed: the burst check doesn't learn from a link's history. It's a fixed rule that works from the first click, and its counters only live for seconds.
A team in a meeting is safe on office, home or mobile networks, because a burst only counts when the clicks come from one data-center network, and known corporate security gateways are never treated as one. The honest edge case is the one you describe: a company proxy that exits through a cloud provider we don't recognize, with several people clicking in the same second. Those clicks would be labeled a burst rather than disappear, so they'd show under "not counted as human" with that reason and you could judge them yourself.
If you ever want to run a few postings through it next to your own filter, the free plan shows the same breakdown.
Snipzr Team
