Invalid Traffic (also called Non-Human Traffic) is traffic which is not created by humans, but rather by bot activity on a website. Advertisers and publishers want their content and ads to be viewed by potential consumers, not bots or other automated scripts. While IVT can comprise of good bots such as search engine crawlers that catalog content for users to find, IVT is mostly used to refer to malicious and/ or fraudulent bots.
There are two types of Invalid Traffic:
General Invalid Traffic (GIVT)
GIVT comprises of bots, spiders, search engine crawlers, and traffic from known data center IP addresses that generate non-human traffic. They also include activity-based filtration using campaign or application data (and their transaction parameters), and browsers that pre-fetch or pre-render pages for user convenience. GIVT generally identifies itself clearly and can be easily filtered out.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) comprises fraudulent or malignant bots and scripts that are designed to commit various types of illegal activities. Detecting SIVT goes far beyond the simple pattern and behavioral matching of GIVT, requiring considerably more advanced statistical analysis to differentiate between fraudulent and genuine activities.
Types of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic
- Bots or scrapers pretending to be human visitors
- Hijacked devices and/ or sessions, in which non-user generated ad requests are made, as well as hijacked ad tags and creative elements
- Ads that are concealed, stacked, or obfuscated by other means
- Invalid proxy traffic
- Malware, adware and similar threats
- Manipulation of analytics via bots
- Misrepresented sites and ad impressions
- Cookie manipulation, including stuffing, stacking, and harvesting
- Obfuscated or falsified location data