Dive Brief:
- Invalid ad traffic is an issue that impacts every player in the digital ad world, and the Media Ratings Council issued guidelines in October to improve how vendors report bad traffic.
- The guidelines break invalid traffic into “general” and “sophisticated.” Ad tech vendors have issues with the sophisticated category because it involves more judgment on their part meaning each vendor is determining invalid traffic differently based on probabilistic techniques.
- According to an Interactive Advertising Bureau report from November, invalid traffic is responsible for $200 million in lost ad revenue.
Dive Insight:
Research from digital security company Are You A Human that analyzed more than 3 billion impressions and found it could only positively verify 42% as people and not bots, Ad Exchanger reports. No matter what the full scope of the invalid ad impression problem, the MRC’s new guidelines have put vendors on notice by requiring general invalid traffic detection for vendor accreditation, and offering a separate accreditation process for the more difficult sophisticated invalid traffic detection.
What does this mean for ad tech firms? Getting accredited for sophisticated invalid traffic detection might be necessary to get the business of large ad buyers, including agencies such as GroupM.
Joe Barone is managing partner of digital ad ops at GroupM and a member of the MRC’s Digital Committee. He told Ad Exchanger, “Our position is that we don’t work with a vendor that can only do general invalid traffic detection. We require vendors to scrub the sophisticated invalid traffic from the viewability count, and for our publishers to accept payment on viewability, they understand that we’ve scrubbed all fraud from those numbers.”
For now the issue is complex, but given the attention industry groups like the MRC and IAB are paying to bad ad impressions, vendors should work with industry players to alleviate the problem as much as possible.