#adfrauddetection

Are you proactively analyzing the ad traffic of your campaigns?  

Is it really coming from genuine users or just being generated by bots? 

Yes, a significant portion of traffic that makes your ad campaigns seem successful could be invalid traffic. According to mFilterIt’s analysis featured in FICCI Report 2025, invalid traffic contributes to as much as 30–50% of activity across digital channels, directly distorting performance metrics and draining ad budgets. 

This means the performance you see on dashboards may not always reflect real user intent. Instead, it could be influenced by automated systems, proxies, or manipulated interactions that inflate impressions, clicks, and even conversions. 

If your campaigns are costing you more than they’re performing, it’s time to rebuild your strategy, because the issue might be lying in your traffic itself.

Ad fraud has become one of the biggest reasons impacting your campaigns and marketing budgets across walled gardens, open networks, affiliate platforms, apps, and programmatic ecosystems.

The first half of 2025 recorded an average global ad fraud rate of 39.7%, and fraud peaked at 49% in June, the highest in five years. With AI-driven bots, fake users, and manipulated attribution becoming more advanced, the financial impact is far deeper than most marketers realize.

Every brand’s marketing program runs on one principle – more visits amount to more leads. While Google and META highly influence users’ journey but not all that stands true. The journey is simple but equally prone to the complexities of digital advertising ecosystem. This shifts the real question from how many visits your campaigns generate to where those visits are coming from or if they are leading to any conversions?

We saw this firsthand while working with one of the USA’s leading aggregator players. For them, deeper validation of their campaign traffic was the turning point. When they looked closer at where their visits were actually coming from, the picture changed entirely.

Mobile app advertising is all about data coming from CPI campaigns – ROAS and LTV being the go-to metrics to measure campaign performance and success. But are you sure the metrics you are relying on are giving you the right results? 

The numbers on your dashboard are not always true.  

As advertisers pour more budget into mobile performance campaigns, many overlook critical vulnerabilities – mobile ad fraud. It’s not just a line-item loss, it’s a performance killer that inflates Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and erodes Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). 

The BFSI sector runs some of the most high-stakes digital campaigns in advertising. With customer lifetime values stretching across years of loans, credit cards, investments, and insurance renewals, every lead matters enormously. But that’s precisely what makes BFSI such a lucrative target for fraud. 

Performance campaigns in BFSI are built around a simple promise: pay per lead, optimise for cost per acquisition. It’s efficient in theory. In practice, it’s where exploitation begins. Because a bad click isn’t just a bad click — it travels downstream, pollutes the funnel, and contaminates every stage below it. Fake clicks become fake leads. Fake leads inflate CAC. And inflated CAC quietly bleeds campaign budgets dry. 

Make most out of your ad spend

Among a plethora of challenges faced by a brand and a marketer, ad fraud makes it to the top of the battle list. This battle is real- the bots eating up the digital ad impressions and burning a hole in the effectiveness of ad spending. What’s the outcome?

The advertising has no effect on your business and money spent on ads goes down the drain (well, to the bots).

Studies indicate that 25% (maybe more) of ad clicks are fraudulent clicks which means that brands and marketers pay the fraudsters one out of every four times when an ad has been clicked. 

Ad fraud is not just a basic bot traffic problem anymore. It’s an issue contaminating the entire marketing funnel silently. Here’s what the data says, and what leaders must do next. 

Imagine spending ₹100 on a digital campaign and losing ₹20–30 before a single real customer ever sees your ad. Not due to a bad creative. Not a flawed targeting strategy. But because the digital advertising ecosystem, the programmatic advertising pipelines, the affiliate networks, and the ad placements, are structurally misplaced. 

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is not just one of the biggest sporting events in the country; it’s also one of the most powerful advertising platforms for brands. Every season, millions of viewers tune in across TV and digital platforms, making IPL a high-impact opportunity to drive brand visibility at scale. 

Naturally, brands go all in. From live broadcast placements and digital ads on OTT platforms to in-play overlays during matches, IPL advertising budgets are spread across formats with one common expectation: maximum visibility.