Invalid traffic & fraud
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.
Fraud rate and IVT rate are often used as if they meant the same thing, but they do not. IVT rate counts everything that should not be billed, including honest crawlers and accidental duplicates. Fraud rate tries to count only the intentional part: bots pretending to be human, spoofing, stolen attribution and similar schemes.
In practice, SIVT is often used as a proxy for fraud, because most sophisticated invalid traffic is designed to deceive. In mobile app marketing, MMPs report fraud rates on installs and in-app events, such as the share of installs rejected for click injection or SDK spoofing.
Be careful with published fraud statistics. Estimates vary enormously by who is measuring, what they measure (impressions vs. installs), which markets and channels, and how "fraud" is defined. Industry-wide dollar estimates are models with wide assumptions. For your own business, the useful number is a fraud rate measured consistently over time, broken down by supplier, with clear definitions.
Think of it like this
If IVT rate is every wrong item in the delivery, fraud rate is only the items someone swapped on purpose.
An example
An MMP reports that 8% of a shopping app's paid installs in Latin America were rejected as fraudulent, mostly click spamming, while the verification vendor on its display ads reports 2.5% IVT, of which 1.1% is SIVT.
Related terms
IVT rate
IVT rate is the share of measured impressions, clicks or visits identified as invalid traffic, usually shown as a percentage and often split into GIVT and SIVT.
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.
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.
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.
MMP (mobile measurement partner)
An MMP (mobile measurement partner) is an independent company that attributes app installs and in-app events to the ads and ad networks that drove them, and detects mobile install fraud.
Sources: MRC Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines Addendum (2020 update), TAG: fighting fraud