7.4% of tablet in-app ad clicks are accidental

Facebook recently announced its decision to crack down on accidental clicks; the social network won’t charge advertisers if the user goes back to the original page within two seconds of clicking the ad. Advertising Age and MediaPost covered the news in depth.

Pixalate is taking a deeper dive into accidental clicks to see just how big of a problem they are across different devices and channels. Smartphones are hit the hardest by accidental clicks, but the other "mobile" device — the tablet — isn't immune from the issue.

One of the telltale signs of an accidental click is that the click happened too fast. Using this definition, Pixalate dug into all clicks that came via programmatically-served ads in July 2017 to bring some hard numbers to the discussion.

Tablet in-app display ads have a 7.4% accidental click rate

Key takeaways

• Tablet in-app display ads had an accidental click rate of at least 7.4% in July 2017
  • This is slightly higher than the 6% accidental click rate within smartphone apps
• Web video ads on tablets had an accidental click rate of 5.7%
  • This was well below smartphone web video ads, which had an accidental click rate of over 13%
• App video ads on tablets had an accidental click rate of 3.8%
• Web display ads on tablets had the lowest accidental click rate, at 0.70%
  • This is in line with smartphone web display ad accidental click rates, which were 0.88%

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