TAG 2019 Advertising Fraud Benchmark Study

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The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) released its 2019 TAG Fraud Study of participating TAG member companies worldwide.  The TAG study defines “fraud” as IVT (InValid Traffic), which ran at an overall rate of about 1.4 percent of just over 200 billion ad impressions from campaigns run by six major ad agency groups.

TAG assigns IVT into two categories.

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  • Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) – which made up about .9% of that 1.4% – includes “traffic identified through advanced analytics, multipoint corroboration, human intervention—such as hijacked devices, ad tags, or creative; adware; malware; misappropriated content.”
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) – which makes up the remaining ~0.5% – includes “traffic identified through routine and list-based means of ltration—such as bots, spiders, other crawlers; non-browser user agent headers; and pre-fetch or browser pre-rendered traffc.”

Access the entire TAG Fraud Benchmark Study

Why it matters

The IVT rate reported for TAG members is about 88% below the industry average for ad fraud, which reflects the effectiveness of TAG’s guidelines.  The study was conducted between January and August 2019 by The 614 Group.

TAG is an advertising industry association created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) , the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) whose areas of work are to eliminate fraudulent ad traffic, combat malware, fight internet piracy and promote transparency.

TAG published the results of a survey in collaboration with the Brand Safety Institute (BSI) earlier in 2019 finding that consumers would drastically reduce or stop spending on products advertised on videos that are stolen or lead to infection by malware.

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