General Invalid Traffic vs. Sophisticated Invalid Traffic: What You Need to Know
By Hunter Gebron, Director of Strategic Initiatives
When it comes to talking about ad fraud you will often hear the words ‘Invalid Traffic (IVT)’, ‘Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)’, and ‘General Invalid Traffic (GIVT)’ thrown around interchangeably.
And while these terms are useful for determining how we as an industry classify Invalid Traffic when it comes to pinpointing exactly what it refers to in the context of ad fraud they can be confusing:
- What do they really mean?
- How different are they?
- Does my fraud detection service know the difference?
- Does my fraud detection service block one or both of these?
The terms themselves have been around for some time but were standardized in October of 2015 by the The Media Rating Council’s Categories of Invalid Traffic and Associated General Requirements.
Invalid Traffic (IVT) — aka Non-Human Traffic (NHT), is ALL traffic that is not created by real humans. IVT can be both ‘good’ bots like those used by search engines and ‘bad’ bots like the ones used by fraudsters.
Since IVT can mean both good and bad bots, the MRC decided to create two sub-categories, GIVT and SIVT, to distinguish between the two.
General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) — is the Good Bots category of IVT. It deals with detecting routine, self-identifying bots, crawlers, and unsafe browsers. There are, however, some anti-fraud prevention techniques mentioned in GIVT such as the blocking of known data center IP addresses.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) — is the Bad Bots category of IVT. This is the category where most ad fraud occurs such as:
- bots masquerading as legitimate users
- hijacked sessions and ad tags
- malware
- manipulated measurements
As an industry, it is useful to have clear-cut definitions for these different types of Invalid Traffic. However, the ways in which these definitions are presented to people is often confusing and cryptic for the layman. Worse over, when these traffic designations are used by anti-fraud companies within the industry without further explanation, customers can be given a false sense of security.
Recently the ad fraud detection company Integral Ad Science (IAS) changed how they label ad fraud from Fraud to Invalid Traffic, as you can see below.
IAS states that the “goal of this label change is to create a clear distinction that invalid traffic is not always malicious (SIVT) — some of the time, it’s benign non-human traffic (GIVT).”
But this is only useful if the UI actually displays when ad fraud is GIVT vs. when it is SIVT. Otherwise, media buyers will be left guessing. One can imagine a scenario where the numbers pertaining to ad fraud are inflated because the ‘benign’ IVT and nefarious ad fraud are conflated into one giant number and generalized under the IVT label.
Another example of how these labels can be misleading is TAG’s Certified Against Fraud Program which only requires that its members be compliant with regard to GIVT.
The approach we take for adChain Audits is to analyze both GIVT and SIVT. By capturing over 200 unique data points at the impression level and displaying it through our custom UI, we are able to show our clients exactly what category of Invalid Traffic (GIVT or SIVT) was flagged and why.
This level of granularization allows us to pinpoint exactly where fraud is occurring and empowers our clients to redirect spend away from these fraudulent channels and towards real humans.
A recent example taken from one of our client’s campaigns that was using a traditional fraud vendor found 1% fraud. When running it through our solution adChain Audits we were able to detect 58% fraud. This was likely due to the traditional fraud company filtering too heavily for GIVT and not enough for SIVT.
We’ve shown a couple of examples of how Invalid Traffic labeling can be misleading. If you are unfamiliar with how your fraud detection technology classifies IVT then we recommend that you ask them about it. The last thing you want to find out is that your campaign spend is only being protected against limited types of GIVT while the majority of the SIVT is getting through.
