With the last quarter of the year in motion, advertisers are frantically trying to spend all their ad budgets and meet their annual goals. However, many ad managers run into the issue of fraudulent traffic, which generates clicks and spends their money, but brings no results.
Threat actors use computer-generated bots to replicate the activities of actual customers and fool advertisers into paying for ad traffic.
A variety of approaches are utilized to produce false traffic, such as infecting customers’ personal computers and mobile devices with malware that loads websites without their knowledge or even infecting cloud services.
To get a clear view of the current ad fraud landscape, the research by Fraudlogix, an ad fraud prevention company, evaluated 42 billion ad impressions to determine the severity of the non-human or bot traffic problem in Q2 2022.
The findings reveal that, on average, 21% of traffic advertisers pay for is generated by computers and scripts, not real people.
The most noteworthy finding is that certain browsers send through significantly more fraudulent traffic than others.
For example, the highest percentage of illegitimate traffic comes through the Russia-based Yandex browser. The analysis reveals that nearly 1 in 3 ad impressions coming across Yandex were non-human.
The Opera browser is also one of the favorites for fraudulent traffic. Over 26.3% of ad traffic coming through the Opera search engine was labeled as “non-human”.
Google Chrome (19.5%), Apple Safari (19.1%), and Microsoft Edge (17.9%) are relatively similar in terms of the percentage of bot traffic.
Finally, the most favorable browser to target your ads towards is Mozilla Firefox, as only 13.5% of traffic coming through this browser was computer-generated.
To read the full article, head over to: https://atlasvpn.com/blog/nearly-30-of-ad-traffic-on-yandex-and-opera-browsers-is-bot-generated-a-study-reveals