#adfraudprevention

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. 

In recent years, the MENA region has emerged as one of the fastest-growing digital advertising markets in the world. With ad spend projected to exceed $8 billion by 2026, the region is experiencing an unprecedented surge in number of mobile-first users, rising eCommerce platforms, and innovative app ecosystems. But along with this digital acceleration comes an equally aggressive threat: ad fraud. 

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. 

OTT advertising seems to be a safe bet right now. Brands are moving serious budgets here to reach a wider segment of audience at once.  

In 2025, 28% of total digital ad spend in India was heavily driven towards OTT platforms and video content.

But what if we told you that the audience pool that you are reaching right now is limited? The numbers that you see on your dashboard are not always true.  

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.

Bot traffic is taking up more than half of the internet traffic. Out of which, 37% of the traffic is driven by bad bots. (Source: Imperva)

And this bot traffic is beyond just inflated activity.  

Sophisticated ad fraud techniques penetrate the funnel, impacting not just analytics but end goals like sign-up, purchase, etc.  

They can bypass basic ad fraud detection methods easily, mimicking human-like behaviour. It skews the data, further impacting decision-making, conversion rates, and retention across mobile and web campaigns

It’s that time of year again. Finance wants numbers. Leadership wants plans. And marketing teams across the country are doing what they do every time during financial year close: reviewing channel spends, comparing ROAS across platforms, and deciding where next year’s budget should go.

But here’s what most of those budget conversations skip.

Channel-level reporting tells you what you spent. It doesn’t tell you whether any of it actually worked the way you think it did.

If you’re running app campaigns at scale, you’ve probably seen this before. Your attribution reports look clean, installs are coming in, and your ad fraud detection tool shows no major issues—yet the overall quality of users doesn’t feel right. 

For app marketers, with fraud checks now bundled into most attribution platforms, it’s easy to assume traffic quality is covered. But these validations are mainly built to ensure installs are attributed correctly, not to deeply assess how users behave after they enter the app. And that’s where things start to drift.