Websites with 10% or more fraudulent traffic are a complete waste of advertisers’ dollars, according to a study conducted by Fraudlogix, a company that helps detect fraudulent traffic for both supply and demand sides in the programmatic buying space.
Fraudlogix studied five advertisers from different verticals last month whose campaigns ran real-time, CPM display ads across 13 exchanges and covered more than 140,000 sites. The good news was that the great majority of them, 72%, drew fewer than 10% fake visitors. The surprising news was that these virtually fraud-free sites accounted for 98% of conversions in the campaign, meaning that the remaining 28% produced a mere 2%.
“This research shows that even a site with 60 to 70 percent real traffic fails to convert,” said Fraudlogix CEO Hagai Shechter. “What we concluded was that such sites are based on buying traffic as cheaply as possible, so even with real traffic, the quality is just not there.”
Advertisers in the study spent 36% of their budgets on non-producing sites, a huge efficiency deficiency.
“The takeaway is that all real Web traffic isn’t created equal,” Shechter says. “Effectively, these advertisers would have saved a third of their budgets with little difference in their results had they just not advertised on these sites.”
