Ad Fraud

What is ad fraud?

Ad fraud is also called advertising fraud or digital ad fraud. It is the practice of boosting clicks, impressions, and other metrics through malicious activities like invalid traffic, which wastes the advertiser’s ad spend.

Types of invalid traffic

• GIVT: General Invalid Traffic is the traffic caused by bots and crawlers while they’re doing their usual activity without the intention of inflating ad impressions, clicks, etc.
• SIVT: Sophisticated Invalid Traffic is designed to commit ad fraud and is much harder to detect and identify than GIVT.

Types of ad fraud

• Click fraud: Bots or humans clicking on a Pay Per Click ad without a buying intention.
• Domain spoofing: Fake websites are disguised as a legitimate site, tricking advertisers into buying low-quality ad space at high prices.
• SDK spoofing: Inserting a malicious bot into an app that generates fake app installs.
• Ad injection: Fake ads replacing genuine ads or placed next to them without the website owner’s knowledge through plugins or malware.
• Ad stacking: Placing one ad on top of another and collecting revenue for both even though the user viewed only one.
• Pixel stuffing: Placing ads into pixels and earning impressions from them even though they are not visible to the users.
• Geo masking: Low-quality traffic disguised as high-quality traffic (from prominent regions) to earn more from impressions.