Executive Summary

Digital ad fraud is still a major problem for programmatic advertisers and their partners throughout the supply chain. Education and awareness have improved, along with detection. Efforts to continue to expose more of the programmatic supply chain are making a difference, but there are still risky pockets of supply and other vulnerabilities.

How much money are advertisers (still) losing to digital display fraud?

Fraud detection is difficult enough; estimating the dollar value of losses to fraud involves enough unknowns that estimates vary wildly. But the most optimistic outlooks still suggest advertisers will lose billions this year.

What digital channels are the riskiest in terms of ad fraud?

As in recent years, mobile in-app inventory remains relatively prone to fraud due to challenges in detection and in-app measurement. Connected TV (CTV) advertising is also risky due to fragmentation plus high demand and low legitimate supply relative to that demand.

How are advertisers and partners working to clean up the digital display ecosystem?

Using antifraud verification services is a best practice, but industrywide moves like the introduction of ads.txt years ago and app-ads.txt more recently have notably disrupted fraudsters. Trade bodies and coalitions of ad tech firms will continue with similar initiatives to help bring programmatic to a more mature “v2.0” with less—or at least different—ad fraud.

What other types of fraud should marketers be aware of?

Influencer fraud is likely on the radar of every brand involved in influencer marketing. Attribution fraud is also a problem.

WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT? This report includes updated benchmarks for invalid traffic (IVT) and other types of digital ad fraud, along with analysis of best practices in mitigating and preventing it.

KEY STAT: More than one in three US digital media professionals surveyed in December 2019 by verification firm Integral Ad Science (IAS) cited increasing levels of ad fraud as a programmatic challenge.