{"id":117429,"date":"2017-04-26T22:16:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T03:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/understanding-digital-ad-fraud-bot-traffic\/"},"modified":"2024-12-21T05:50:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T10:50:03","slug":"understanding-digital-ad-fraud-bot-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/paid-media\/understanding-digital-ad-fraud-bot-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Digital Ad Fraud and Bot Traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much has been made of the rise of fraudulent digital ad traffic over the last couple years, with headlines such as \u201cRussian Ring of Digital Ad Crooks is Reportedly Making Over $3 Million a Day<\/a>\u201d and \u201cHackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views<\/a>\u201d making a splash in the press.<\/p>\n

Hackers! Russian rings! Crooks! $5M\/Day! It sounds quite dramatic, full of intrigue and hinting at a huge conspiratorial criminal underbelly in digital advertising \u2013 it reads like the stuff of James Bond films. And it is dramatic. Sort of.<\/p>\n

But before we get sucked into the hype and declare all digital marketing tainted and rife with fraud, it\u2019s important to understand what the fraud is really about, where it came from, and why it matters.<\/p>\n

When programmatic (machine\/software-led) ad buying and selling started to become a seriously viable and effective way of advertising digitally, some clever individuals (clever AND shady!) began to realize that the removal of the human element in ad buying (time-consuming, tactical, costly) in favor of the machine element (quick, intelligent, cost-efficient) opened up possibilities to capitalize on the trend and make themselves some money. They saw a Trojan Horse entry point to the model and leapt on it.<\/p>\n

Put simply, bot or fraud traffic is the result of this \u201cget-rich-quick\u201d scheme. Personal computers are set up in an infrastructure that essentially turn them into auto-clicking machines. The computer is served an ad, \u201csees\u201d it, \u201cclicks\u201d it, and repeats. Over and over and over again. Therefore, these ad impressions that are being served to and seen by a computer, or even clicked on by a computer, are fraudulent. They never even cross a human\u2019s field of vision. These hackers then went about creating websites upon websites upon websites, and offering up their ad inventory to the programmatic exchanges. The ad space on one of their sites gets sold programmatically, an ad is served programmatically, a bot sees or clicks on it, the websites make money. And so on and so on, ad infinitum.<\/p>\n

That sounds all very grim; it would seem all advertisers should cease and desist programmatic buying altogether, right? It\u2019s not real traffic, it\u2019s wasting money, it\u2019s all a big con job, etc. etc. Not so fast.<\/p>\n

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