Advertising groups in Canada and the United States are urging companies to demand greater transparency from the agencies that help them buy ad space online.
Reports released this week show that marketers are often not getting their money’s worth in digital ad buys and also do not receive enough visibility into whether their ads are being seen by humans or internet bots.
On Tuesday, the Association of Canadian Advertisers released a study measuring “invalid traffic.” The study looked at whether ad views were coming from humans or from malevolent bots that actively try to leech marketers’ dollars through fraud.
Sentrant, one of the firms analyzing traffic and rooting out fraudulent activity, looked at more than 235 million “impressions,” or instances in which an ad appeared on a page. They found that 6.4 per cent of all potential views of an ad were not generated from real human audiences, but potentially were fraudulent bots.
Read more at The Globe and Mail