The Cheapest Impressions May Be Costing You the Most

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This year our industry is projected to hit a massive milestone: Over $1 trillion in spend and rising. If the ad industry were to create a country and enter the world stage, this would put us in one of the top 20 economies on earth, beating out the GDPs of roughly 170 countries. With so much money changing hands, there is an ever-increasing number of bad actors who seek to exploit the massive amount of investment in the ad industry. According to Trafficguard, the ad industry is projected to lose over $170 Billion by 2028 from fraud. Fraud certainly exists across all channels but is commonly overlooked (or ignored) when it comes to strategies that fall towards the beginning of a consumer journey. This is especially true with many CTV & display campaigns in DSPs and the Google Display/Video Network ecosystem. Many will look at a dashboard and see Clicks and Impressions streaming in at low CPMs with CTR rising and take it at face value. But are these real clicks? Are they really the eyeballs of your ideal audience? Or are your KPIs hyperinflated by an army of bots?

The truth can hurt… It is important to embrace some core concepts.

1. Your creative is only as good as the infrastructure that is built around your ad that gets it delivered to your ideal audience at the ideal time. Seems simple enough right?
2. True campaign management is risk management: Preparing for what you don’t want to happen and avoiding sub-optimal scenarios is often what separates the meh campaigns from the great ones.
3. Numbers in advertising can easily be misleading to the untrained eye. Sure, KPIs are vital to watch but if you are strictly chasing clicks, impressions, and views without seeing (or knowing) where your ads are actually serving, then you are not getting the full picture.
4. The biggest victims of ad fraud are often those that don’t have the guardrails in place to mitigate it. Maybe it’s a shrug worthy 2% or maybe it’s a heart wrenching 50% of your budget. The latter is much more common than you think.

Ad fraud manifests in many different forms. Below we will break out the most common.

Fraud Type	Description
Invalid Traffic (Bot Traffic / “IVT”)	Automated programs simulate human browsing behavior, generating ad impressions or clicks without real users.
Click Farms	Groups of people are paid to repeatedly click ads or visit websites to artificially inflate engagement metrics.
CTV Device / App Spoofing	Fraudsters simulate connected TV devices or streaming apps requesting video ads even though no real viewer exists.
SSAI Fraud (Server-Side Ad Insertion)	Fake server-side ad requests mimic legitimate streaming traffic, generating impressions without real viewers.
Made-For-Advertising (MFA) Sites	Websites built primarily to generate ad impressions rather than provide meaningful content.
Domain Spoofing	Fraudulent websites disguise themselves as premium publishers in ad exchanges to command higher prices.
Ad Stacking	Multiple ads are layered in a single placement so only one is visible while all register impressions.

Additional Insight

Bots now generate the majority of internet traffic, with roughly 37% classified as malicious “bad bots”. (Source: Imperva)

Advances in AI and automation are making bots easier to deploy at scale and increasingly effective at appearing like legitimate users.

Bots are responsible for roughly 65% of CTV ad fraud and without proper safeguards, more than one in four CTV impressions fail basic quality standards such as fraud-free, viewable, and brand-safe delivery. (Source: DoubleVerify)

Across Google and programmatic display campaigns, invalid click rates commonly range between 15–30%. YouTube has invalid view rates that are typically averaging around 8–12%. (Source: PPC Chief)

What To Do About It

Good news and bad news. Good: There are several impactful levers that can be pulled to reduce fraud risks. Bad: Many advertisers do not employ these strategies, favoring budget delivery with increases in KPIs at the lowest cost possible. Here performance looks great on a dashboard but in reality (or in a placement report) not so much. It may just turn out that “High CTR” inventory package in your DSP with a $3 CPM led you to spend a quarter of your budget on sketchy apps and some questionable “AI slop” websites that show a rotating loop of 10 ads on the homepage to an audience of bots. Fortunately, there are several ways to reduce the risk of fraud which often comes down to a heightened emphasis on inventory and targeting.

Whitelist

One of the most popular choices among advertisers is creating a placement whitelist. This enables your ads to only show on preapproved placements rather than the complete open web (where most fraud is located). This is a great way to ensure brand safety and to have control over where users see your ads. These are fairly easy to deploy in DSPs and can be implemented in Google Ads as well (albeit they make it a bit more difficult). Orchard recently tested this on several Google Display Campaigns and saw the following results.

• Higher Quality Impressions: While overall impressions declined, viewable impressions increased by 318%, indicating a significant shift toward ads that were actually seen by users rather than simply served.
• Massive Reduction in Low-Quality Inventory: Non-measurable impressions dropped by nearly 100%, driven by serving ads only on pre-approved placements instead of the MFA-heavy open web.
• Improved Real Audience Reach: The whitelist expanded unique audience reach, suggesting ads were delivered to more real users instead of being repeatedly served to low-quality or automated traffic.

Private Marketplace (PMPs)

PMPs allow advertisers to buy ad space directly from publishers in a format that is comparable to a private auction. This significantly reduces risk from fraud as PMPs are done with trusted publishers with premium sites. CPMs are often much higher here, but this is often seen as the gold standard of inventory.

Supply Path Optimization (SPO)

One of the biggest structural challenges in programmatic advertising is the complexity of the supply chain. A single ad impression may pass through five to seven intermediaries before reaching a publisher, with each step introducing fees and opportunities for fraud. Sticking with reputable SSPs and more direct paths helps cut out unnecessary middlemen.

Verify Your Supply With ads.txt & app-ads.txt

This is a simple but important safeguard that helps ensure that you are buying from authorized sellers. Publishers declare who can sell their inventory, and ads.txt helps platforms verify that chain. Without it, you increase the risk of buying spoofed or resold inventory. In practice, this usually comes down to making sure your platform is filtering for authorized sellers. This is something that can typically be confirmed in your settings or with a quick check-in with your rep.

If You Buy Inventory Packages in Your DSP, Do So with Caution

Clearly vet and monitor placements after selecting inventory packages and avoid those with low CPMs that claim to have high CTR’s or engagement. Quality and peace of mind often come with a bit of a price. One additional callout for buying on open inventory is to upload and maintain an exclusion list of sites that you don’t want to serve on.

Optimize Your Audiences

This may sound straightforward, but it is often overlooked. Campaigns should have clearly defined audiences that closely reflect your ideal customer profile. Gone are the days of pairing a simple age group with a few basic interests and calling it an audience. Today’s strategies rely on more intentional audience construction using defined signals such as first-party data, lookalike audiences, third-party segments, and geofencing. Layering these signals together helps ensure campaigns reach users with verified behavioral or location indicators, while also making it more difficult for fraudulent traffic to qualify.

Be careful of “expansion” settings within your campaign.

Many platforms often have expansion features that promote themselves as levers to pull that will expand your targeting to similar audiences, inventories, and placements (especially if your campaigns are struggling to spend budget). Without proper guardrails in place, this can buy cheap placements that do not align with your strategy. If your campaign is underperforming, it is a much better idea to take a deep dive to diagnose the issue rather than toggling such features on.

Third-Party Tools

Third-party verification tools provide an additional layer of protection by analyzing traffic patterns, device signals, and impression behavior to detect invalid traffic and potential bot activity. These solutions typically integrate directly into DSPs.

While there is much in the ad industry that is rapidly changing, many fundamentals remain the same. You want your campaign to be shown in the best places, at the best times, to your ideal audience. Everyone wants this but more often than not campaigns fall short due to oversimplified buying practices and a lack of guardrails and oversight. As fraud is evolving, so are the ways to combat it. The winners of tomorrow’s media landscape will be those that ensure that every dollar of ad spend is monitored and maximized.