The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the US has issued stark findings revealing that advertisers across the globe will lose (US)$6.3 billion of spend because of fake traffic and engagement generated by "bots" in 2015.
Touted as the biggest study of its kind, the peak body joined forces with White Ops - a company which develops new bot detection technologies to differentiate between bot and human interaction - to show how online advertising is being skewed by individuals tampering with the IP addresses and identities of the general public.
According to the report, which focused on the US but has been expanded to draw a picture of likely outcomes across the world, bots accounted for 11% of all display impressions observed. In video that figure comes in dramatically higher: bots accounted for 23% of all video impressions observed. In programmatic and retargeted inventory, bot traffic averaged 17%, while they consumed 19% of retargeted ads.
The study was taken from 5.5 billion impressions; the largest public study to-date of bots in digital advertising and examined traffic across the inventories of 36 ANA participants in the following industry sectors: auto, beer/spirits, financial/insurance, hospitality, pharma, restaurant, retail and technology.
Finance, family and food domains had the highest occurences of bots, with 16–22% of advertising click-throughs and impressions coming from bots. Tech, sport, and science had the lowest bot percentages, ranging from 3–4%.
At night, bot activity was higher than genuine human interaction, while total bots observed were higher during the day, but remained a lower proportion of overall traffic.
The study also showed how sophisticated bot controllers have become, and how adept they are at mimicking the behaviours of genuine users. It says: "We expected to find bot-focused websites with nothing but a bot audience, but out of nearly three million websites covered in the study, mere thousands were completely built for bots. Most of the bots visited real websites run by real companies with real human visitors. Those bots inflated the monetised audiences at those sites by 5 to 50%."
The report makes a number of recommendations, not least stressing that advertisers should implement continuous fraud monitoring, but also the necessity to use bot detection to ensure that sites are not sourcing traffic and monitoring for all types of ad fraud, including adware and bot traffic.
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