How to Protect Your Traffic and Revenue - Ads Fraud

How to Protect Your Traffic and Revenue

In the world of digital marketing, there is an invisible tax on nearly every dollar you spend. The one taxing you is a multi-billion-dollar industry that works in the shadows and taxes everyone's budgets just enough to make a dent, but not enough for someone to do something about it. This tax slowly drains your budget, corrupts your data, and lowers your ROI. While this description is a bit dramatic, we all know it by a simple name: ad fraud!

Marketers have always treated ad fraud as a rare scam or minor cost of doing business. If you still think this way in 2025, then you are naive! Ad fraud is an industrial-scale problem, caused by sophisticated networks using automated bots and complex schemes to steal from you. Whether you’re an advertiser buying traffic or an affiliate selling it, you need to do everything you can to mitigate it the best you can!

Protecting yourself is your responsibility as a serious performance marketer. To protect yourself, you need to know what to look out for, how to recognize common types of ad fraud, and find actionable strategies to protect your budget, traffic, and revenue!

Types of Ad Fraud

Ad fraud isn’t a single activity; it’s a term for a variety of schemes designed to hinder your ad revenue or disrupt a competitor's campaign. To fight it, you need to know what to look out for!

• Bot Traffic

This is the foundation of most ad fraud. It’s non-human traffic generated by automated scripts or “bots” that are programmed to visit websites, view ads, and click on links. These bots can be sophisticated, mimicking human behavior to avoid basic detection.

• Click Fraud

This is the classic form of ad fraud.  It involves bots or sometimes even low-wage workers from East Asia countries that work in “click farms” and repeatedly click on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. The motive is either to deplete a competitor’s advertising budget or to fraudulently generate revenue for publishers. 

• Impression Fraud

This is a more subtle form of stealing from advertisers that pay for Cost Per Mille (CPM). The common schemes are:

• Ad Stacking: This is when they layer multiple ads on top of each other in a single ad spot. Only the top ad is visible to real users, but impressions are registered for all of them. 

• Pixel Stuffing: Loading dozens of ads into a single 1x1 pixel on a webpage. The ads are invisible to the human eye but still count as served impressions. 

• Domain Spoofing

This is when a low-quality website acts like it's a premium, well-known publisher within programmatic ad exchanges. Advertisers think they are paying a premium for a high-quality placement, but their ad is actually being shown on a worthless site. 

• SDK Spoofing

A sophisticated form of mobile ad fraud where fraudsters use bots to generate fake signals of in-app activity, most commonly faking app installs to collect a payout from advertisers running user acquisition campaigns. 

How Bad Traffic Is Costing You

Ad fraud is a crime, just sadly, catching the perpetrators is not something that is done reliably. It has a damaging impact on every legitimate player in the industry. From advertisers to affiliates and publishers. 

• For Advertisers

The consequences can be severe. First, you waste ad spend, which is money you paid for clicks and impressions that were never seen by a real human. 

Second, fraudulent traffic completely skews your analytics data, leading you to make decisions that might not always be in your best interest. As an example, you might want to scale up a campaign that seems to have great CTR, not realizing it's all bot clicks, leading to even more wasted money and awful ROI. 

• For Affiliates & Publishers

If you unknowingly buy low-quality traffic and send it to an affiliate offer, you risk damaging your reputation with your affiliate network or manager. 

This can lead to chargebacks on your commissions or even the termination of your account. Your own marketing efforts are wasted on driving traffic that will never convert. 

Your Defensive Playbook: Strategies to Prevent Fraud

You can't eliminate ad fraud, but there are things you can do to try and mitigate its impact. 

• Choose Your Partners and Platforms Wisely

Don’t buy traffic from any shady, unknown source just because it's cheap. Work with reputable ad networks, Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), and affiliate networks that have a vested interest in traffic quality and have built-in fraud detection systems. 

• Master Your Analytics

Finding ad fraud is best done by mastering your analytics and what they mean. There are always some signs that point to it, and knowing which ones can be a big deal.

• Extremely High CTR with Bad Conversion Rates

Let’s say you have 30% CTR on a display banner. In all likelihood, it's not the ad that's doing well, but ad fraud showing itself. Make sure your Conversion Rates match that CTR before killing it!

• Unnatural Bounce Rates

A bounce rate of 100% is an indicator of low-quality traffic, but a rate of nearly 0% is even more suspicious. It suggests that bots are programmed to click through to multiple pages. 

• Suspicious Traffic Sources

Are you getting a huge volume of traffic from a single, obscure website? Or are your clicks coming from data centers instead of residential IP addresses? You need to check the sources to make sure you are not being scammed. 

• Strange On-Site Behavior

Look for sessions with a time-on-site of less than one second, or traffic that comes exclusively from outdated browser versions or operating systems. 

• Use Whitelists and Blacklists

Don’t let ad platforms place your ads anywhere they want!

• Blacklists: Actively maintain a list of websites and IP addresses that you know are fraudulent or low quality and exclude them from your campaigns. You should update this list all the time, as there are always new bad sites to syphon away your funds.
  
• Whitelist: an even more powerful strategy. Instead of blocking bad sites, create a list of only the high-quality, high-performing websites where you want your ads to appear.

• Implement Third-Party Verifications and Detection Tools

If you have enough budget, you can use a dedicated ad fraud detection service that can help you out. Companies like HUMAN, Integral Ad Science (IAS), DoubleVerify, and others specialize in real-time fraud monitoring. 

They can analyze your traffic before, during, and after the click to block bots and ensure your ads are being served to real humans in brand-safe environments. 

What Should You Do If You Suspect Fraud?

If you see red flags and suspect you are a victim, you need to act quickly. 

• Gather Evindece

Try documenting everything that has happened. Take screenshots of your analytic reports showing the suspicious metrics (CTR, bounce rates, traffic sources, etc.). Compile a detailed report of your findings. 

• Contact the Platform or Network

Open a support right away with your Google/Facebook ads, DSP, or your affiliate network. See what each of them can do to help you. Present them with the evidence and demand an investigation where you think it's needed. 

• Request Refunds and Block Sources

If you work with reputable platforms, they will usually investigate your claims and see what they can do about it. Sometimes you will get refunds for clicks and impressions that are confirmed to be fraudulent or invalid. But not all of them will be that good to you. The shady platforms will often refuse to do anything about it; the best solution is to cut ties with them and blacklist them from future campaigns. 

The thing with ad fraud is that preventing it 100% is impossible. The whole industry is run by intelligent, motivated criminals who are doing everything they can to milk as much as they can from you. As detection methods improve, you should also follow them and always try your best to find and prevent it from happening to you. The less you are the victim of fraud, the better! But you need to constantly stay on top of your game!

Conclusion

Ad fraud is not a distant problem. It's something that affects all affiliates to some degree, and knowing how much it affects you can be a huge help when trying to fight it. Ignoring the problem will only cost you time and money. 

You need to understand what they are doing and how they target you. Once you know where you are most vulnerable, you can adapt to it and hopefully mitigate most of the problems. Make sure your budget goes where it matters, reaching real people, driving engagement, and generating growth. 

Have you had issues with ad fraud? What did you do to make it less of a problem? Share your experience with us in the comments below!

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