#invalidtraffic

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. 

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. 

As a publisher, you need to make sure that your content is up-to-date, accurate, and easy to understand by your audience and advertisers (for running campaigns). After all, your audience and advertisers are the backbone of generating revenue. Invalid Traffic (IVT) can affect your relationship with the audience as well as advertisers.

As the global travel industry moves toward a projected US$1063.00bn market by 2028, competition for traveller demand has never been more intense. Airlines, OTAs, hotels, and travel apps are investing aggressively across digital channels to capture attention early, shape intent, and convert inspiration into bookings. 

To achieve this, travel industry typically run a mix of awareness campaigns to spark destination interest and performance campaigns to drive booking intent and improve the look-to-book ratio. Today, more than 78% of travel advertising budgets are allocated to digital ads, representing $7.73 billion in spend this year alone. 

However, there is a catch. Campaigns may appear healthy on the surface, a significant portion of this spend never reaches a real traveller or influences a genuine booking decision. What often goes unnoticed is what happens after a campaign goes live.  

One of the common pain points our clients have expressed is that their number of installs doesn’t match the number of conversions. They see a high volume of installs happening, but this doesn’t convert into outcomes.

There is not just one reason behind an unusual spike in installs. It can be bots, or something more advanced which a human eye might miss easily. In one of a recent campaign data we evaluated, we observed that a new and unusual technique is used to hide invalid traffic driving fake app installs from Android mobile versions.

Learn the proven tips to prevent invalid traffic, follow Google’s policies, and safeguard your earnings. 💰 Stay compliant, stay monetized!

👉 Avoid an AdSense Ban: 10+ Rules Every Publisher Must Follow

Bot fraud in digital advertising generally falls in the category of invalid traffic by the marketers no matter good or bad since the bots are not the target audience and cannot be converted into a protentional lead.  

Types of Invalid Traffic:   

General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) – It is one of the simplest bots that can be detected easily, and a lot of good bots traffic comes under GIVT as they are not meant to fool the bot detection tool. But some fraudsters may also deploy GIVT as they are easy to make and work against some of their targets.  

Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) – SIVT detection is the bots that one should look out for as these are more capable and are often designed to target to bypass cybersecurity and fraud prevention tools. For Example – sophisticated bots might imitate how a human would use a website so it would be difficult to identify between a human and bot. SIVT is common in ad fraud schemes.