Digital Lexicon Hub

Deliberate activity that generates invalid advertising impressions, clicks, conversions or other events for financial or competitive gain.

Ad fraud wastes media budget and corrupts the data used to optimize campaigns, so a few fraudulent placements can shift bidding toward sources that never reach real buyers.

An advertiser notices a mobile app network with a 9% click-through rate and almost no post-install activity, excludes it, adds a fraud-verification vendor to all programmatic buys and requests invalid-traffic credits for the affected period.

Detection is probabilistic, so filters both miss sophisticated invalid traffic and flag some genuine users. Vendor rates are not directly comparable, and platform credits rarely cover the downstream cost of decisions made on polluted data.

The industry splits invalid traffic into general IVT, such as known data-center traffic and crawlers removed with lists and rules, and sophisticated IVT, such as bot farms, hijacked devices, ad stacking, domain spoofing and click injection, which needs behavioral analysis. Controls include ads.txt and sellers.json, pre-bid filtering, post-bid verification and refund processes.