Invalid traffic, often known as IVT, is a word used in internet advertising to describe when an ad is accessed by someone other than legitimate users - so any other interaction besides your intended target. Invalid traffic includes access such as search engine bots or crawlers, invalid proxy traffic, accidental clicks, and more; It also refers to other more nefarious activity that's perpetrated, malicious software attacks that target your advertising money with fraudulent traffic. In this article, we'll cover different types of invalid traffic and how to deal with them. If you're an online advertiser, this information will be crucial in helping you combat ad fraud and save your money while doing it, let's get going!
Invalid traffic, commonly known as 'IVT,' refers to clicks or ad impressions that may artificially increase the costs associated with an ad or the revenue of an ad operator. IVT is commonly mistaken for advertising fraud, although the fundamental distinction is that not all IVT is bad in intent - and being able to distinguish between the two is key.
The two classifications I'm referring to are;
The most prevalent type of invalid traffic is known as General Invalid Traffic (GIVT). Advertising traffic generated by search engines and antivirus software crawlers is an example of this type of invalid traffic. Crawlers are programs that automatically collect and save data from the internet, such as text, photos, and videos. Invalid traffic also includes measurement bots and analytics crawlers. Though these crawlers are categorized as IVT's, they serve a secondary purpose and are not considered particularly harmful. As a result, combating GIVT is frequently a low priority.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic, on the other hand, is a malevolent kind of invalid traffic ( SIVT). This traffic is associated with criminal media operators who purposely increase the rewards paid out by advertisers or steal from legitimate media. Unlike GIVT, SIVT causes direct harm to advertisers, necessitating prompt action. SIVTs use a variety of strategies to alter advertising expenses in order to commit 'ad fraud.' Let's have a look at the most frequent SIVT approaches.
Auto-refresh is a form of ad fraud that happens when an ad has been automatically refreshed a number of times in order to inflate the number of impressions generated on the ad. There is also another method where fraudsters reload the ad by manipulating user behavior such as scrolling. Cookie stuffing or also cookie dropping is another popular type of ad fraud. With cookie stuffing, multiple third-party cookies are stuffed onto a user’s browser which makes it seem as if the user has visited the site where the ad is placed. These fraud vendors then steal advertising costs paid to legitimate sites.
There are several methods for determining whether the traffic to your website is considered illegitimate. Next, we'll go over how to detect and delete invalid traffic - but if you want an easy all-in-one solution, the Drivonic® suite of programs have you covered, but more on that later!
To begin, use an external tool, such as a marketing automation platform, to examine an IP address's traffic. Users' traffic should typically have a phone line or internet provider line shown on the IP address. Any other data centers or rental IP addresses indicated to have a high likelihood of being an IVT, so we strongly advise identifying the addresses of any invalid traffic you find and eliminating them from your ad campaigns to reduce fraud damage. One thing to keep in mind is that some ad platform like Google attempts to mitigate and reduce these types of IVT gives advertisers credits when possible. But IVT monitoring and prevention can be taken to the next level by using real-time, non-human click-level systems which will also elaborate on later in this article.
Attaching an analysis tag to an ad may also be effective in tracking users' movements in real-time. This helps you to detect any suspicious behavior on the system, such as an unusual volume of access from a single terminal or frequent page updates in a short period of time. If you suspect ad fraud, blacklist the source and stop posting the ad.
In some circumstances, you can uncover an IVT by merely looking at the performance statistics of an ad. Sites with exceptionally low or high CTR (click-through rate) are simple to spot, and it's critical to pay attention to these abnormalities since these sites may have 'hidden advertisements' or 'auto refresh,' as we discussed before in this article. We recommend blacklisting these sites to temporarily stop the offending adverts, depending on the severity of the problem.
We propose deploying an ad verification tool if you run a particular number of ad campaigns in order to efficiently take measures against any potential IVTs. Ad verification tools, as the name suggests, are intended to verify your adverts. An ad verification tool, also known as an ad fraud prevention tool, assists you in determining whether or not your advertising is being displayed in the appropriate locations and whether or not users are viewing the ad. Due to the impracticality of personally checking each ad, several businesses have begun to use ad verification in their marketing operations in recent years.
There are numerous alternatives for preventing Ad Fraud and deploying your advertisements while saving money, but one stands out above the rest. Drivonic® Eye-On Bot Filtering which is included with every Drivonic® program. The best part is that it's supported by the industry's first Real-Time Non-Human BOT Tracking Filter, which is designed to return up to 33% of your daily ad traffic, and make sure you're reaching the customers you intended to. We monitor in Real-Time, you won't just hear about the issue afterward when you've already lost your ad budget. So no more monthly report cards, know where you are always, and no more disappointing results - we've served over 10,000 programs to 1100+ dealers, and the results speak for themselves. We proactively ensure that you not only have peace of mind about how your money is being spent, but you'll be using an industry-leading platform that ensures you're in front of your customers, and your competitors. All of our programs are backed by this technology, so whether you go with MarketBuilderSM, or MobileLyncSM, or LaneDriverSM you'll have best-in-class Ad Fraud prevention to have confidence that your ads are being seen by real live local humans.