Impression Fraud
Artificially generating fake ad views to inflate metrics or defraud advertisers in CPM-based campaigns.
What Impression Fraud means
Impression fraud involves artificially inflating ad impression counts through techniques like bot traffic, ad stacking (layering invisible ads), pixel stuffing (rendering ads in tiny invisible frames), domain spoofing, and ad injection. This type of fraud primarily affects CPM-based campaigns where advertisers pay per thousand impressions. The Media Rating Council (MRC) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have established standards for valid impressions, and platforms implement traffic quality filters to detect and exclude invalid impressions. Third-party verification companies like IAS, DoubleVerify, and MOAT provide additional fraud detection. Advertisers can protect themselves by monitoring viewability rates, suspicious traffic patterns, and using verified inventory sources.
Related terms
Ad Fraud
Fraudulent activity that manipulates ad delivery, clicks, or conversions to generate illegitimate revenue or inflate metrics.
Click Fraud
The practice of generating fake or invalid clicks on ads to drain an advertiser's budget or inflate publisher revenue.
Invalid Traffic
Non-human or fraudulent ad traffic that doesn't represent genuine user engagement, classified as general (GIVT) or sophisticated (SIVT).
Viewability
A metric measuring whether an ad was actually visible to a user, based on industry standards for pixels-in-view and display duration.