Fraudulent traffic can be a huge nuisance for marketers because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up wasting their money on traffic that does not come from real people. Malicious actors often use bots to generate artificial traffic and rob marketers of precious ad dollars, and a recent report from Fraudlogix shows the startlingly high rate of bot traffic that goes to paid ads online and in search engines.
This report analyzed over 42 billion impressions received by various ads, and with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that it revealed an average of 21% of traffic being comprised of bots. The number of bots that would provide impressions for an ad also depends on the browser that is being used. Just under thirty percent of the traffic from Yandex, or 29.4% to be precise, turned out to be bots.
Opera was the second worst performing browser by this metric, with 26.3% of the traffic that ads receive from this browser being made up of bots with all things having been considered and taken into account. That suggests that traffic from Yandex and Opera has a higher likelihood for being bot driven than might have been the case otherwise.
In spite of the fact that this is the case, other browsers such as Chrome and Safari also have concerningly high proportions of bot traffic. The number for Chrome is around 19.5%, and Safari comes in at a close fourth place with 19.1%. Microsoft Edge performs marginally better with 17.9%, and then we have Firefox as the best performing browser with just 13.5% of its traffic being made up of bots.
However, the 21% overall average is still a bit too high. It indicates that over a fifth of the total ad budget for various marketers is going to waste since it gets taken up by bots instead of connecting the ad to real world consumers. This may improve in the coming years, but only if industry leaders try to solve the problem.
Read next: 26% of Users Don’t Like Seeing Ads Next to Controversial Politicians
This report analyzed over 42 billion impressions received by various ads, and with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that it revealed an average of 21% of traffic being comprised of bots. The number of bots that would provide impressions for an ad also depends on the browser that is being used. Just under thirty percent of the traffic from Yandex, or 29.4% to be precise, turned out to be bots.
Opera was the second worst performing browser by this metric, with 26.3% of the traffic that ads receive from this browser being made up of bots with all things having been considered and taken into account. That suggests that traffic from Yandex and Opera has a higher likelihood for being bot driven than might have been the case otherwise.
In spite of the fact that this is the case, other browsers such as Chrome and Safari also have concerningly high proportions of bot traffic. The number for Chrome is around 19.5%, and Safari comes in at a close fourth place with 19.1%. Microsoft Edge performs marginally better with 17.9%, and then we have Firefox as the best performing browser with just 13.5% of its traffic being made up of bots.
However, the 21% overall average is still a bit too high. It indicates that over a fifth of the total ad budget for various marketers is going to waste since it gets taken up by bots instead of connecting the ad to real world consumers. This may improve in the coming years, but only if industry leaders try to solve the problem.
Read next: 26% of Users Don’t Like Seeing Ads Next to Controversial Politicians
