An ad nobody saw is not cheap. It is wasted.
Invalid traffic (IVT) is every ad request that does not come from a person with a real interest: bots, data-centre traffic, hijacked devices, hidden and stacked ads, clicks from click farms. It is sold at the same price as a person.
What it costs you
Enter your own numbers. Use the invalid-traffic rate your verification partner reports for your open-web buying.
Each month $6,000 pays for ads that no person saw, and your real cost of reaching a person is 14% higher than the price you agreed.
Why it is hard to avoid on your own
Fraud follows money, and it hides inside ordinary-looking supply. A site buys cheap visits to hit a number. A bot loads pages overnight. An ad is rendered in a frame one pixel square. From the buyer’s side each of these is a line in a report that looks like any other.
Filtering after the fact helps, but you have already paid, your reporting is already skewed, and your bidding has already learned from visitors who were never there.
What IVT-free means here
It is a description of how the network is run, not a slogan.
- Every page view is measured. ClearTrust’s detection runs on every page of every publication, before ads are requested.
- Every ad is measured. The same detection runs again at the creative, so an ad counted as shown was shown to a visitor that passed.
- Invalid traffic is taken out of what we report. The numbers you receive have it removed, and the removal is itemised so you can check it.
- One owner, one ad server. Every placement is managed centrally in Yieldo, with a published ads.txt for each publication. There are no resellers between you and the page.
- Content made for readers. Each publication exists to explain one subject properly. None is built to hold ads.
Why ClearTrust’s name on it counts
ClearTrust is an anti-fraud company. Its work is detecting invalid traffic and ad fraud for the businesses that buy and sell advertising. A network that carried bot traffic would cost ClearTrust more in credibility than it could ever earn in ad revenue, which is the strongest guarantee we can offer: our incentives point the same way as yours.
It also means the people who run these publications are the people who know what fraud looks like from the inside, and the publications double as the place we prove our own methods.
What we do not claim
No detection is perfect, and anyone who says theirs is has not looked hard enough. New fraud appears, and some of it will reach a page here before it is recognised. When that happens it is removed from reporting, and we would rather show you the removal than pretend it never occurred.