The UK’s Association of Online Publishers reported last year that 35% of the publishers in the UK thought that ad fraud was a significant threat to business. Ad blocking was the only thing considered by a larger percentage of people to be a significant business threat.
Interestingly, Integral Ad Science(IAS) provided data that proved that the use of fraudulent ads in the UK is on the decline. IAS found that of the digital display ad impressions that it analyzed on its very own platform for the first half of 2016, only 3.2% of the ads were found to be fraudulent.
Comparing these finding to previous editions of the same study, there has been a steady decline in the amount of digital display ads that were found to be fraudulent: Q1 2016 was at 5%, Q4 2015 was at 7.8%, and Q3 2015 was at 9.1%.
Currently, using this data, the UK ranks as the lowest when compared to other countries that are tracked by IAS. In Q4 2015, the UK was ranked 2nd, with only the United States having a higher rate of fraudulent ads. By Q2 2016, the UK had been surpassed by Germany, Australia, the US, and France who all have been found to have higher rates of fraudulent ads than the UK.
Interestingly, it was also found that programmatic trading of ad inventory did not greatly increase the rate of fraudulent digital display ads. Publisher-direct ad sales were found to have a low fraud rate of 2.6%, whereas programmatic ads were minimally higher at a rate of 3.2%, just .6% higher. With a margin this small between publisher-direct ads and programmatic ads, it is easy to see that there will likely be an increase in confidence level when it comes to programmatic trading in the near future.
