Invalid traffic (IVT)

Advertisers pay for people. Invalid traffic is everything that gets counted as an ad view or click but was not a genuine person having a genuine chance to see the ad: search-engine crawlers, bots pretending to be shoppers, ads hidden behind other ads, or a publisher's own staff refreshing a page.

The MRC splits IVT into two tiers. General invalid traffic (GIVT) is the routine kind, caught with lists and simple rules, such as known data center traffic and declared crawlers on the IAB/ABC Spiders & Bots List. Sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) is the hard kind: bots that mimic humans, hijacked devices, adware, domain spoofing and incentivized manipulation, which need advanced analytics and multi-point corroboration to find.

A common confusion: IVT is not the same as ad fraud. IVT is the umbrella for all traffic that should not be billed, including harmless crawlers and accidental double-clicks; fraud is the intentional subset. Measurement companies accredited under the MRC IVT guidelines must remove IVT from the counts that advertisers are billed on, which is why IVT rates show up in every serious campaign report.

Think of it like this

Think of a shop's footfall counter: IVT is every tick caused by the cleaner, the delivery man walking in and out, or someone deliberately waving at the sensor, rather than a real customer.

An example

A campaign reports 10 million impressions. The verification vendor flags 300,000 as GIVT (known crawlers and data-center IPs) and 450,000 as SIVT (bot sessions and spoofed domains), a 7.5% IVT rate; the advertiser should not pay for those 750,000.