IVT classification at ImpScore

We are working to make mobile advertising much more effective than now. We are focused on identifying invalid traffic and help to fix what can be fixed and block what should be blocked.

Invalid traffic is a traffic, which is not “ideal” for buyer. This means that buyer pays not for what he or she expects.

The simplest example: you pay for app A but impression happens in app B.

More complicated: you pay for impression in app A but it happened on some server and no one saw your banner.

One more: you buy impression on device in Germany but it happened on device in Bangladesh because the user used VPN.

How we graduate invalid traffic

We divide whole traffic into 3 groups:

• Low risk traffic – ImpScore has not detected any violations
• Medium risk – an impression has some violations but may lead to a conversion for buyer
• High risk – mostly likely buyer will not be able to get any results from this impression, because it was invisible, bot-generated, etc.

Examples of Medium Risk traffic

Here are the most common violations, which lead to decreasing of banner performance for buyer:

• One situation was described in the example above: you get impression in a different app than you expected. Your impression is visible, user may click and perform an action but may be you paid more than it cost or targeted using a wrong app category.
• You paid for full screen banner (320x480) but it was shown in a medium rectangle placement (300x250) and your banner was zoomed or cropped.
• You expected to get impression on device with cellular connection but got with WIFI
• A proxy or VPN was used

Examples of High Risk traffic

This kind of traffic in most cases is a wasting of buyer’s budgets. Here are several examples:

• Impression was generated by bot on server
• Impression was generated by fraud code in app on mobile device
• Impression was rendered in background and not viewable to user
• Impression was rendered using some hostile tools (modified to fake information about app, device, etc. Sometimes is used to sell mobile web traffic as an in-app).

Some words about viewability

Viewability is one of the most sensitive and important parameters and it affects the performance of ads. But at the same time rendering a banner somewhere in background is the most common violation.

Not viewable impressions can be as intentional (if publisher want to earn more but avoid annoying user) and not intentional (some kind of technical mistake).
ImpScore detects not viewable ads regardless the reason why it happens.

Stay tuned and follow un on LinkedIn to stay up to date or drop us a line to email if you have any qustions.

Good luck!