Invalid traffic & fraud · also called Advertising fraud, digital ad fraud
Ad fraud
Ad fraud is the deliberate faking or misrepresenting of ad impressions, clicks, installs or conversions so that someone gets paid for advertising that no real, interested human saw or did.
Ad fraud is theft dressed up as advertising. Someone generates fake views, clicks or app installs, or lies about where an ad ran, and collects money from advertisers who think they reached real customers.
It takes many forms: Bot traffic and botnets loading pages, domain spoofing that passes a junk site off as a premium newspaper, ad stacking and pixel stuffing that "serve" ads no one can see, click injection and SDK spoofing that steal credit for app installs, lead generation fraud with fake form fills and SSAI spoofing on streaming TV. Big cases include Methbot, which White Ops (now HUMAN) said in 2016 was taking an estimated $3 to $5 million a day from video advertisers.
Fraud is a subset of invalid traffic: all fraud is IVT, but not all IVT is fraud (a search crawler is IVT but innocent). It persists because programmatic buying is fast and automated, supply chains are long, and payment usually happens before anyone checks. Defences include pre-bid filtering, post-bid measurement, supply-chain standards like ads.txt and sellers.json, and certification schemes such as TAG Certified Against Fraud.
Think of it like this
It is like a courier company billing you for 1,000 deliveries when it dropped 700 parcels in a skip and signed the delivery slips itself.
An example
An advertiser in Brazil buys 5 million cheap video impressions through an unknown reseller. A post-campaign audit finds 60% came from a spoofed domain served to data-center browsers; the advertiser disputes the invoice and blocks the seller ID.
Related terms
Invalid traffic (IVT)
Invalid traffic (IVT) is any impression, click or visit not coming from a real person with a genuine chance to see the ad, whether caused by bots, fraud or error.
SIVT (sophisticated invalid traffic)
SIVT (sophisticated invalid traffic) is invalid traffic designed to look human or legitimate, which can only be found through advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration and often human review.
Bot traffic
Bot traffic is visits, ad impressions or clicks generated by automated software rather than people, ranging from honest search crawlers to fraudulent bots built to look human.
Fraud detection
Fraud detection in advertising is the process and technology of identifying invalid or fraudulent impressions, clicks, installs and conversions, so they can be blocked in advance or excluded from billing.
Fraud rate
Fraud rate is the percentage of impressions, clicks, installs or conversions judged to be deliberately fraudulent, a narrower measure than IVT rate, which also includes innocent invalid traffic.
TAG Certified Against Fraud
TAG Certified Against Fraud is a certification from the Trustworthy Accountability Group for companies that meet anti-fraud requirements such as MRC-standard IVT filtering and supply-chain transparency.
Sources: MRC Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines Addendum (2020 update), TAG: fighting fraud