A marketing manager at a consumer goods brand in India once ran a programmatic display campaign with what looked like excellent results. The click-through rate was well above benchmark. The impressions delivered on schedule. The campaign report looked clean.
Then someone looked at the post-click behaviour. Of all the clicks recorded, nearly 70% resulted in zero time on site. No scroll. No page load completion. Just a click signal and an immediate departure — or in many cases, the click happening from an IP address that had generated thousands of identical clicks that day.
The campaign had been largely serving ads to bots. The money was gone. And this is not an unusual story in Indian digital advertising.
What ad fraud actually is
Ad fraud is any activity that generates fake signals in the advertising ecosystem — fake impressions, fake clicks, fake conversions — for financial gain. Somewhere in the programmatic chain, a publisher or intermediary benefits from making a bot look like a human audience.
Bot Traffic (Invalid Traffic / IVT)
Automated programs that simulate human browsing, clicking on ads, and generating impression data. Sophisticated bots replicate human behaviour patterns closely enough to fool basic detection. Estimates suggest 20–35% of programmatic traffic in some Indian inventory pools contains significant IVT.
Domain Spoofing
A fraudulent publisher sells inventory by pretending to be a premium publisher. A brand buys what it thinks is inventory on a respected news website and actually receives impressions on a low-quality or completely fake website. The DSP sees the premium domain name; the ad serves somewhere else entirely.
Ad Stacking
Multiple ads stacked on top of each other in a single ad slot. Only the top ad is visible. All of them get counted as served and charged to advertisers. A single pixel on a page can technically hold dozens of “delivered” impressions.
Click Injection (Mobile)
Particularly prevalent in India’s large mobile app ecosystem. Fraudulent apps intercept install signals and falsely claim credit for app downloads that were driven by organic search or other channels. Performance-based mobile campaigns are especially vulnerable.
How big is the India problem
Getting precise numbers on ad fraud in India is difficult because the measurement of fraud is itself imprecise — you can only detect what your detection tools are sophisticated enough to find. What is clear from conversations with ad verification companies, DSPs, and brand-side marketers is that Indian programmatic inventory carries higher-than-average fraud rates compared to Western markets.
Several factors contribute to this. The Indian open web inventory market has a larger proportion of long-tail publishers whose quality is difficult to verify. Mobile app inventory — which is a significant portion of Indian digital advertising — has known fraud problems globally and India is not an exception. And historically, the pressure from Indian brands to optimise for lowest CPM has pushed buying toward inventory pools where fraud tends to concentrate.
Who is doing something about it
The ad verification industry — companies like DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and MOAT — exists specifically to detect and prevent ad fraud in programmatic campaigns. Their products integrate into the DSP buying workflow and flag or block suspicious inventory before an impression is served.
These tools are widely used by large Indian advertisers but significantly under-deployed among mid-market brands. The cost is a factor, but the bigger barrier is often awareness — brand teams running programmatic campaigns through agencies do not always know that ad verification is a separate product they should be asking about.
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) maintains certification standards for publishers and platforms in the programmatic ecosystem. TAG-certified inventory carries a measurably lower fraud rate. Not all Indian publishers have pursued certification, but the number doing so is growing as brand-side pressure increases.
What brands can do right now
- Ask your agency or DSP what percentage of your programmatic budget goes to TAG-certified inventory.
- Request post-campaign invalid traffic reports as standard, not optional. Any reputable DSP can produce these.
- Add an ad verification layer — DoubleVerify or IAS — to programmatic campaigns above a certain budget threshold. The cost is typically 2–5% of media spend.
- Audit post-click behaviour: average time on site, pages per session, bounce rate from programmatic traffic vs other sources. Anomalies are a signal.
- Move budget toward private marketplace deals and programmatic guaranteed where possible — curated inventory pools with verified publishers carry significantly lower fraud rates than open auction.
- For mobile campaigns, use mobile measurement partners (AppsFlyer, Adjust) that have fraud detection built in and can flag click injection.
Ad fraud will not be eliminated. The economics of the open web make it persistently profitable for bad actors. But the gap between brands doing nothing and brands with basic verification in place is large enough that investing in the basics will materially reduce wasted spend.
The brands that treat verification as a standard cost of programmatic buying — like viewability measurement, like brand safety tools — rather than an optional extra will consistently get more genuine value from their media budgets than those that do not.
