Internet advertisers blow $6.3 billion a year on bogus Web traffic, a new study reveals.

03-09-2015 08:07:03

A 60-day study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and ad fraud detection company White Ops came to a conclusion likely to unsettle many digital ad buyers: purchasing ads from premium publishers does not protect marketers from fraud

These are all findings from a new study commissioned by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in what it says is the largest public study of bots in digital advertising. The report concludes that advertisers could lose as much as $6.3 billion to bot fraud next year.

The ANA partnered with online fraud detection firm White Ops to analyze 181 campaigns from 36 ANA member companies, including Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg's, Merck and Pfizer. Ad budgets ranged from $10 million to more than $1 billion and the brands ranged across nine vertical categories. Tagged to identify bot fraud, the ads accounted for 5.5 billion impressions in 3 million domains over 60 days in August and September 2014.

"This report identifies specific practices marketers, agencies and publishers can immediately implement to combat fraud and the fraudsters that perpetrate it," said Bob Liodice, President and CEO of the ANA.

White Ops estimated the total monetary loss by looking at specific ad placements rather than trying to extrapolate by looking at losses within a brand "because bot percentages vary unpredictably across campaigns and placements".

The study found that while some bot fraud is triggered by completely fake websites, the majority of bad traffic (67 percent) came from bot nets taking over unsuspecting users' home computers. As users are logged into services such as Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, the bots get targeted by advertisers running campaigns on those platforms. The bots can mimic regular user behavior:

Sophisticated bots moved the mouse, making sure to move the cursor over ads. Bots put items in shopping carts and visited many sites to generate histories and cookies to appear more demographically appealing to advertisers and publishers.

Video ad campaigns come under threat by both bots and video autoplay adware, which "used humans who had minimal or no control of the adware applications to fraudulently consume advertising inventory".

Even premium publisher inventory is not immune from bots. The study found that direct-buy campaigns on well-regarded domains showed bot percentages exceeding 10 percent. Ad fraud was generated by bots and ad injection.


A few other key findings from the report:

  • 11% of all display ads were served to bots
  • 17% of programmatic display ads were served to bots
  • 67% of bot traffic stemmed from residential IP addresses
  • Bot traffic spiked between midnight and 6 a.m. and on weekends

The ANA's study spanned 181 campaigns run by 36 advertisers. More than 5.5 billion impressions on 3 million domains were monitored.



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