Discover how Invalid Traffic (IVT) affects clicks across desktop web, mobile web, and mobile app advertising traffic in North America. Campaigns bought on a cost-per-click basis often carry a market premium, making them a prime target for fraud tactics such as bot traffic. This report highlights key insights, including the most common types of click-based IVT, the ad unit sizes most frequently associated with it, and the app store categories with the highest click IVT rates.
To compile these reports, Pixalate analyzed approximately 45 billion global open programmatic advertising transactions across desktop web, mobile web, and mobile app traffic in Q2 2025. Pixalate's datasets — which are used exclusively to derive these insights — consist predominantly of buy-side open auction programmatic traffic sources.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the ratio of ad clicks to ad impressions. In other words, it reflects how frequently users appear to engage with an ad after seeing it.
As used herein, and per the MRC, “'Invalid Traffic' (IVT) is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed invalid is that it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots, etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”
Since click-throughs often drive a market premium, they are a common target for fraud schemes. Click fraud is a type of ad fraud where clicks on a digital ad are generated, often via bot traffic, with malicious or deceptive intent rather than genuine user interest.
Determining IVT (including fraud) for click traffic is challenging because regular click traffic and IVT click traffic look similar in many ways. In addition, mapping clicks to impressions is challenging due to timing considerations.
Pixalate can map clicks to impressions and flag clicks for IVT using our Click Fraud Detection technology. Pixalate supports several click-related IVT types that suspicious users, ad creatives, or publishers could generate.
Pixalate determines the country and region of traffic based on the detected IP address and other identifiers.
Pixalate is a global platform for privacy compliance, ad fraud prevention, and data intelligence in the digital ad supply chain. Founded in 2012, Pixalate’s platform is trusted by regulators, data researchers, advertisers, publishers, ad tech platforms, and financial analysts across the Connected TV (CTV), mobile app, and website ecosystems. Pixalate is MRC-accredited for the detection and filtration of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT).
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Disclaimer: The content of this page reflects Pixalate’s opinions with respect to the factors that Pixalate believes can be useful to the digital media industry. Any proprietary data shared is grounded in Pixalate’s proprietary technology and analytics, which Pixalate is continuously evaluating and updating. Any references to outside sources should not be construed as endorsements. Pixalate’s opinions are just that - opinion, not facts or guarantees.
Per the MRC, “'Fraud' is not intended to represent fraud as defined in various laws, statutes and ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for advertising measurement purposes. Also per the MRC, “‘Invalid Traffic’ is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots, etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”
