Did you know bot-driven ad fraud could be siphoning off 35% of your ad budget? As digital advertising campaigns have become more commonplace for businesses of any size, fraudsters have begun to use bots to click on ads with no intention of purchasing. This increases your ad spend while decreasing ROI, and also damages your ability to rely on analytics to check how a campaign is performing.

DataDome Ad Protect addresses ad fraud in all its forms, in particular, click fraud. Identifying fraudulent clicks enables you to pause or stop campaigns with high bot activity, ensuring your budget goes toward generating genuine users and leads.

Understanding Ad Fraud & Its Impact

Ad fraud is the process of fraudulently interacting with advertisements to force a company to spend extra money without seeing a return on their investment or to alter metrics. The main type of ad fraud is click fraud, which is driven by bots that click on ads to trick the platform into believing that real users are interacting with the content.

In 2023 alone, ad fraud cost businesses $88 billion dollars—billions spent on fake clicks and bot users, rather than humans. This number is expected to more than double by 2028, reaching an estimated $172 billion. Digital advertising spend will grow proportionally, but the implication is clear: if nothing is done about ad and click fraud, fraudsters will keep draining billions of dollars from marketing budgets across the internet.

The Hidden Costs of Ad Fraud

The more popular a website, the more expensive it is to run ads on. Additionally, you’re likely to pay for every click on your ads regardless of source—unless you can identify which ones are bots. Ad fraud causes artificial bloating of marketing budgets, forcing companies to pay more for ads that aren’t even being seen by real humans.

The financial impact is twofold: first, you pay more for fraudulent ad clicks, and you don’t get a return on your investment because the bot has no intention of following through with a purchase. In addition, marketers waste time trying to claw back their wasted funds in time-consuming back-and-forth requests made to their advertising platforms—with no guarantee that they will be able to recover anything.

Identifying & Mitigating Ad Fraud

Ad Protect was built to detect click fraud on your ad campaigns while reducing distorted metrics and inflated costs caused by bots, who can click on ads much faster than humans can. Because of this, the best way to identify fraudulent traffic is with bot mitigation technology, which helps identify click fraud traffic while ensuring you don’t pay for fake clicks and leads. On average, we detect 2x more ad fraud than manual efforts like spreadsheets.

DataDome’s multi-layered machine learning techniques—such as signature-based detection, behavioral analysis, and time series analysis—plus the 5 trillion signals we analyze daily, ensures we can distinguish bot traffic from real user interactions with unparalleled precision—more than any competitor on the market. We’ve applied this precision to protect ad campaigns, identifying what portion of your ad budget is being wasted on bot traffic so you can take back those resources.

Conclusion

Bots can cost your business tens of thousands in extra ad spend each campaign, obscure your metrics, and decrease your ROI. Rather than allowing them to do so, implementing proactive detection and prevention measures—like Ad Protect—helps direct your ad spend to real human users. Stopping bot-driven click and ad fraud leaves you more budget for the campaigns that are truly working.

Want to learn more about protecting your marketing budget from ad and click fraud? Explore Ad Protect or book a demo today.