Ad Fraud
Fraudulent activity that manipulates ad delivery, clicks, or conversions to generate illegitimate revenue or inflate metrics.
What Ad Fraud means
Ad fraud encompasses various deceptive practices including click fraud (bots or humans clicking ads to drain budgets), impression fraud (fabricating ad views), conversion fraud (faking conversions), and domain spoofing (misrepresenting website identity). Ad fraud costs the industry billions annually and violates all platform policies. Platforms employ sophisticated detection systems including invalid traffic (IVT) filters, machine learning models, and third-party verification partnerships. Advertisers can protect themselves by using platform-provided fraud detection tools, implementing CAPI (Conversions API) for server-side verification, and monitoring for unusual traffic patterns.
Related terms
Invalid Traffic
Non-human or fraudulent ad traffic that doesn't represent genuine user engagement, classified as general (GIVT) or sophisticated (SIVT).
Click Fraud
The practice of generating fake or invalid clicks on ads to drain an advertiser's budget or inflate publisher revenue.
Brand Safety
Measures taken to ensure ads do not appear alongside harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content that could damage brand reputation.
Viewability
A metric measuring whether an ad was actually visible to a user, based on industry standards for pixels-in-view and display duration.