Invalid traffic (IVT)
Invalid traffic (IVT) is impressions and clicks that do not come from a real person with genuine interest: bots, click farms, fraudulent apps or technical errors.
The Media Rating Council distinguishes two types. General invalid traffic (GIVT) is easy to detect: search engine crawlers, data centre traffic, known automated tools. Sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) is designed to pass as human: infected devices that load ads without their owners knowing, stacked ads or ads hidden in invisible pixels, sites that pose as better-known ones to sell their inventory. This second type is ad fraud in the strict sense.
It is fought on several fronts. IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt and sellers.json files make it possible to check that whoever is selling inventory is authorised to do so; verification tools such as IAS, DoubleVerify or HUMAN filter suspicious traffic before bidding and measure it afterwards; and private deals with known publishers reduce exposure. Every metric, from CTR to cost per conversion, loses meaning unless invalid traffic is stripped out first.
