Fraud & invalid traffic quiz
What counts as invalid traffic, how bots, click farms, cloaking, blending and hijackers work, and how quality is scored and defended. Twelve questions to help you recognise it, not commit it. advanced · 12 questions
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What is invalid traffic (IVT)?
All questions with answers
- What is invalid traffic (IVT)?
Answer: Clicks or visits that do not come from a real person with genuine interest, including bots and accidental or incentivised clicks. Invalid traffic covers anything that should not be billed to an advertiser, deliberate or not. A real person who simply does not buy is valid traffic: low conversion is not the same as invalid. - What separates GIVT from SIVT?
Answer: GIVT can be caught with routine checks such as lists of known bots and data-centre IPs; SIVT needs deeper analysis to detect. In the MRC standard, GIVT is the easily filtered kind and SIVT is designed to look human, for instance hijacked devices or proxies. Both are invalid; the split is about how hard they are to find. - What is a click farm?
Answer: A group of low-paid people, or racks of phones, clicking ads by hand to order. A click farm uses real fingers on real devices, which is why simple bot filters miss it. The clicks are human but carry no interest, so they are still invalid. - What is cloaking?
Answer: Showing a harmless page to reviewers and a different page to ordinary visitors. Cloaking exists to pass ad review with content the real audience never sees. It breaks the rules of every major traffic source and feed, and is one of the surest routes to a permanent ban. - What is traffic blending?
Answer: Mixing poor or fake traffic into good traffic so that the averages still look acceptable. Traffic blending hides bad visits behind healthy overall numbers. It is found by breaking the data down by Sub ID, placement and hour, where the bad slice stands out. - What does a search hijacker do?
Answer: It changes a browser's search engine or homepage without proper consent so that searches pass through a feed the hijacker earns from. Search hijacking usually arrives inside an extension or bundled software. The user's searches are real, but the route was imposed on them, which is why AFS code may not be built into software such as toolbars and extensions. - A bot clicks a sponsored result on an arbitrage page. Who is charged for that click first?
Answer: The advertiser whose ad was clicked. The advertiser is billed unless the search engine filters the click. When it is caught later, the money comes back out of the publisher's earnings as a clawback. So fraud costs both ends, at different times. - Why do fraudsters use residential proxies?
Answer: To make automated traffic appear to come from ordinary home internet connections. A residential proxy routes a bot through a household IP address, so IP-based checks see a normal home user. That is why modern IVT detection also looks at device and behaviour, not just the address. - How do pre-click filtering and post-click analysis differ?
Answer: Pre-click decides whether to show the ad or accept the visit at all; post-click studies behaviour afterwards to catch what got through. Pre-click filtering stops bad traffic before it costs money; post-click analysis finds patterns only visible afterwards, such as zero engagement. Good defence uses both, since neither catches everything. - What is the TQI Score™?
Answer: ClearTrust's Traffic Quality Index, a score built from 150+ filters for bots, fake clicks and fake impressions. The TQI Score™ is ClearTrust's measure of how clean a stream of traffic is. Google's keyword rating is Quality Score, an unrelated metric on the advertiser side that is easy to confuse by name. - A publisher clicks the ads on its own pages "to check they work". What is this?
Answer: Self-clicking, which is invalid whatever the motive. Self-clicking is invalid by definition: the advertiser pays for a click with no customer behind it. There is no allowance for testing, and it is one of the simplest ways to lose a feed. - Why is traffic from data-centre IP addresses treated as suspicious?
Answer: Because ordinary people browse from home, office and mobile networks, while servers in data centres are where automated scripts usually run. Data-center traffic is a classic GIVT signal: real shoppers rarely browse from a rented server. It is a strong hint, not proof, since some VPN and corporate traffic also passes through data centres.