Short answerAd fraud is any activity that makes advertisers pay for impressions or clicks that no real, interested person produced: bots, hidden ads, spoofed domains, faked conversions. You protect your budget by buying from platforms with their own anti-fraud filtering, checking post-click behaviour and conversions, excluding bad placements and verifying sellers with ads.txt and sellers.json.
Fraud is one of the main reasons advertisers distrust programmatic traffic. The good news: most of it can be spotted and filtered if you know what to look for. This article explains the common schemes and a practical checklist.
What is invalid traffic (IVT)?
Invalid traffic is any impression or click that does not come from a real person with genuine interest. The industry often splits it into two groups:
General invalid traffic (GIVT) — easy to detect: known bots, data-center traffic, crawlers that announce themselves.
Sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) — harder to detect: bots that imitate people, hijacked devices, hidden or stacked ads, faked conversions.
Ad fraud is the deliberate part of IVT: someone earns money from traffic that is not what it pretends to be.
Common fraud schemes
Scheme
What happens
Bot traffic
Scripts or bot farms generate impressions and clicks
Domain spoofing
Cheap inventory is sold under the name of a premium site
Ad stacking
Several ads are layered on top of each other; only the top one is visible
Pixel stuffing
An ad is loaded in a tiny, invisible frame
Click injection and fake installs
Conversions are claimed by someone who did not produce them
Incentivized traffic presented as organic
Users are paid to click or install without real interest
Warning signs in your statistics
CTR far above normal for the format with no conversions.
Zero time on site or instant closes after the click.
Traffic spikes from one placement, one hour or one IP range.
Odd device or browser mix, for example many outdated browsers.
Conversions without activity: sign-ups that never log in, installs without opens.
Reports that do not match: your analytics shows far fewer visits than the platform shows clicks.
None of these proves fraud alone, but together they are a reason to investigate.
How to protect your budget
Choose platforms with their own anti-fraud filtering and verified publishers. Ask how bots are detected and what happens to filtered traffic.
Track conversions server-to-server with postback. Pay attention to what users do after the conversion, not just that it happened.
Use placement lists: exclude placements that spend without results, keep proven ones in a whitelist. See ad targeting options.
Start with a test budget and scale only what passes your quality checks.
Compare data sources: platform reports, your analytics and your tracker should roughly agree.
What publishers can do
Fraud hurts honest publishers too: buyers lower prices for inventory they cannot trust. Publishers protect themselves by never buying traffic to inflate impressions, publishing an accurate ads.txt and working with partners that filter invalid traffic. See our website monetization guide.
How Wizads handles traffic quality
Wizads uses its own anti-bot and anti-fraud solutions, monitors traffic quality, works with verified, direct publishers and supports black and white lists, so ads are shown in a brand-safe environment without inappropriate content. Advertisers can track conversions with postback (S2S) and request a free ad test to check traffic before scaling. See the advertiser page.
Frequently asked questions
Can ad fraud be eliminated completely?
No system catches everything, but layered protection — platform filtering, your own tracking and placement lists — keeps it low enough not to distort results.
Is low-priced traffic always fraudulent?
No. Prices differ by GEO, format and competition. Judge traffic by what it does on your site, not by what it costs.
Where do I start if I suspect fraud?
Export placement-level data, compare it with conversions and on-site behaviour, exclude the worst placements and ask your platform's support to investigate. Our guide to buying traffic covers the full process.
Wizads is an advertising network with its own DSP, SSP and ad server. Our team writes about programmatic advertising, website monetization and buying traffic.
