Research finds a 20% invalid traffic (IVT, including ad fraud) rate across global mobile in-app open programmatic ad traffic from March 1-17, 2024; Swappy – Jigsaw Puzzles, Super Goal - Soccer Stickman, Nitro Nation: Car Racing Game among mobile apps with the highest levels of invalid traffic (IVT)
LONDON, 28 March 2024 -- Pixalate, the market-leading fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform for Connected TV (CTV) and Mobile Advertising, today released the March 2024 Mobile Apps IVT Reports for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The series reveals which mobile apps appear to be most impacted by invalid traffic (IVT), including ad fraud, as measured by Pixalate.
To compile this research, Pixalate’s data science team analyzed 5M+ downloadable apps across the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and 17B+ global open programmatic advertising impressions from March 1-17, 2024. Pixalate’s research reveals the average global mobile in-app IVT rate in this time period was 20%.
The reports highlight the five most common types of IVT that Pixalate observed across both mobile app platforms during the study period, which are as follows:
*Note: Parenthetical information denotes IVT detection method(s) per Media Rating Council (MRC) Invalid Traffic Guidelines.
Pixalate excluded spoofing from this report, as spoofing requires different tactics to mitigate it (e.g., blocking an app highly impacted by spoofing could lead to blocking apps with real traffic attractive to buyers). See our Mobile App Spoofing series for a list of apps most affected by the spoofing IVT type.
Learn more about Pixalate’s reported IVT types in our Knowledge Base.
Download the full list of the top 40 mobile apps (20 from Apple App Store and 20 from Google Play Store) with the highest levels of IVT in March 2024:
About Pixalate
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). www.pixalate.com
Disclaimer
The content of this press release, and the Mobile Apps With the Highest IVT Reports (the "Reports"), reflect Pixalate's opinions with respect to factors that Pixalate believes can be useful to the digital media industry. Pixalate’s opinions are just that, opinions, which means that they are neither facts nor guarantees. Pixalate is sharing this data not to impugn the standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but, instead, to report findings and trends pertaining to programmatic advertising activity in the time period studied. 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.”.
