Articles and Research

In our last post on digital ad fraud we talked about the overall percentages of fraudulent ad traffic and briefly broke it down by country. We found that globally 12% of ad traffic was fraudulent. But there's normally a big difference in the amount of fraudulent traffic between desktop and mobile devices and different regions of the world also have different levels. So in this post we're digging deeper into the data and breaking it down by global region and device type.

Not all ad traffic is created equal. Fraudulent traffic can skew campaigns, poison analytics, and waste advertising dollars on non-human ad views. Ad fraud numbers are an important metric to keep an eye on in the digital ad industry and can vary depending on device types and locations where ads are served.

New study by Fraudlogix shows fraudulent impressions are concentrated in relatively few areas of RTB programmatic market

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. (May 25, 2017) –  A new study by Fraudlogix shows that a majority of ad fraud is concentrated in a small percentage of sources within the real-time bidding (RTB) programmatic market. The ad fraud detection company, which specializes in monitoring ad traffic for companies on the sell-side of the RTB digital ecosystem, analyzed 1.3 billion impressions from over 59,000 sources over a 30-day period and found that 68.2 percent of fake impressions came from just 3.2 percent of sources (i.e., publishers).

Following the industry headlines reporting on the percentage of ad fraud in the real-time bidding (RTB) programmatic space, the market can seem like a pretty scary place to be for ad dollars. However, there is good news. Our industry for the most part is reputable and focused on providing clean ad traffic, but we’ve been infected with a small amount of fraudulent publishers. Getting to the root of the problem means looking at these sources of ad fraud, and a majority of fake impressions are originating from a very small percentage of publishers.