Managing and Mitigating Bots

Chapter 10. Ad Fraud

This is the manipulation of advertising traffic to prevent ads being shown to the people they are intended for at the time they were intended to be shown.

Good or Bad?

Ad fraud is nearly always bad, though sometimes the negative impact can be difficult to realize. The basic objective of advertising is to try and present details of a product to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. If done correctly the advertiser is rewarded with increased income and the publisher is rewarded with an advertising fee. Introducing ad fraud makes both of these less likely to happen: advertisers are paying for their ads to be displayed to users who have no intention of purchasing their product and publishers are less likely to get an advertising fee as a portion of the advertising spend is going to to fraudulent actors, it is also bad for the exchanges as they will often have to waive fees generated by traffic identified as automated.

As discussed in “Click Fraud”, there are some situations where it is in the interests of the bot traffic to drive up the revenues of sites that advertise with them, when those sites are driven themselves by advertising.

Ad fraud could, however, be seen as being good for the ad exchanges as they benefit from the transactions between advertisers and publishers. Most exchanges will claim to put in mechanisms to detect and remove automated traffic from all requests they receive.

Ad fraud is a multibillion dollar industry and uses ...