Advertising fraud, defined as the practice of falsifying traffic or traffic-related activities in order to charge advertisers for impressions, clicks or other actions that never occurred in earnest, takes two forms: general invalid traffic and sophisticated invalid traffic.

In an October 2020 post titled “Fearmongering in CTV Advertising,” Comscore stated that it detected a CTV post-bid invalid traffic rate that was slightly higher than 1%. The article advised ad buyers to “separate marketing talking points from fact” when analyzing CTV ad fraud. Other sources we spoke with believed CTV ad fraud was common.

In a post titled “Fearmongering in CTV Advertising,” Comscore stated that it detected a CTV post-bid invalid traffic rate that was slightly higher than 1 percent. The article advised ad buyers to “separate marketing talking points from fact” when analyzing CTV ad fraud. Other sources believed CTV ad fraud was common.

Processes like monitoring data to make sure volume estimates and actual traffic align, enforcing app-ads.txt requirements, and using internal and third-party invalid traffic detection technology make a big difference. The impact on our buyers from any of the recent ad fraud schemes has been nearly non-existent.