Global digital ad spend increase accompanied by rise in invalid traffic

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Source: 'Invalid Site Visits 2021' by ClickCease.

Methodology: ClickCease examined 2.6 billion site visits across 30 major markets from January 1 to May 31, 2021.

More from this source:

• The highest invalid traffic rates come from less mature digital advertising countries such as Mexico (30%), South Africa (28.7%), Ukraine (21.9%), and Russia (17.3%)—which are less likely to have precautions in place to deal with invalid clicks on campaigns.
• Based on year-over-year (2020 to 2021) ClickCease and Cheq data, customer acquisition campaigns have seen a 3% rise in invalid traffic hitting campaigns globally.
• The rise in invalid, non-human and fake user activity comes hand in hand with increasing digital spend to achieve post-Covid growth, and is expected to continue to trend upwards as automation grows and as online fraud becomes more prevalent.
• There are several key implications for marketers, according to Ilan Missulawin, cofounder of ClickCease: "First, money is being wasted on serving ads and retargeting bots and fake users who will never become customers. This brings up an issue of revenue opportunities that businesses are losing by targeting spend at fake users and bots. When you're spending dollars on invalid traffic, that's money that is being diverted away from real human visitors who can actually convert. In addition, your audiences and CRM are compromised when they become infested with bots. This causes marketers to retarget fake users while leading sales teams to chase invalid leads. Finally, businesses using analytics tools face a significant challenge of skewed analytics, as a result of invalid traffic sources."