Commentary

Online Fraudulent Traffic Increases 20% Leading Up To Holidays

The ad-verification company Fraudlogix published recent data showing an increase in fraudulent advertising traffic in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and the holiday shopping season.

Fraudlogix analyzed three months of global programmatic ad traffic and found that the average percentage of fraudulent traffic jumped from 11.6% in October to 14.2% in November. The data includes all device types.

Invalid or fraudulent traffic is generated by bots, hijacked devices, or malware. The data comes from monitoring traffic from more than 640 million unique users, 1.2 billion unique devices, and 12 million URLs monthly.

Fraudlogix is not the only company to identify a rise in fraudulent ad traffic. Companies like Distil Networks estimate that bots create about 48% of all internet traffic across all web sites. Google and White Ops also helped the U.S. Department of Justice indict two people from Kazakhstan and six Russian nationals for alleged involvement in a digital advertising fraud scheme worth about $29 million in fake digital ads.

In October, Fraudlogix released data suggesting that the majority of ad traffic for desktop and mobile came through Chrome browsers and that 14% of that traffic was fraudulent.

A report in November analyzed traffic from the operating system (OS) to see which desktop and mobile systems are the riskiest when it comes to ad fraud.

About 46% -- the largest volume of desktop ad traffic -- came from the Windows 10 OS, followed by 31% from Windows 7 and 7% from Windows 8.1. Apple’s Mac OSX 10.13.6 followed with 3.40%.

Linux had the highest percentage of fraudulent traffic at 23%, followed by Windows 8 at 22% and Windows 7 at 19%.

Fraudlogix also analyzed mobile ad traffic. About 21% -- the largest volume -- came from iPhone 11.4.1 OS, followed by 18% from Android 8.0.0, and then 17% from Android 7.0.

More than 90% of mobile ad traffic came from 13 operating systems.

Last week, Fraudlogix released four ways that marketers can avoid rising fraud, specifically during the holidays.

Fraudlogix suggests that marketers keep an eye on key performance indicators, work with quality publishers, avoid being tempted by cheap ad traffic, and be realistic about campaign goals.

1 comment about "Online Fraudulent Traffic Increases 20% Leading Up To Holidays".
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  1. Craig Mcdaniel from Sweepstakes Today LLC, December 17, 2018 at 4:07 p.m.

    Laurie, personally, I would like to see the trading desks and ad networks back again. Any hand placed ad on a website are the most secure ads ever created. None my 70,000 sweepstakes has ever been fraudlent. The sad news is publishers are not been given a fair chance to hand place ads on the websites.  Why? the market wants a simple method of placing ads on the net with programmatic and security is a after thought. So to your readers, do you feel safer with humans or machines?

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