Ad fraud will cost marketers $84 billion this year – 22% of all online ad spend.

This figure is expected to soar to $170 billion in five years’ time in 2028, according to a new in-depth study from Juniper Research.

Why we care. Ad fraud could be costing your brand money, hurting campaign results, leaving you with fewer genuine leads and poor advertising ROI. With this in mind, it may be worthwhile exploring fraud-blocking technology or reallocating some of your ad budget to your SEO strategy.

Key findings. Juniper’s study analyzed digital advertising in 45 countries across 8 regions, using a dataset of over 78,700 data points from 2019 to 2028. The research found that:

• 22% of all online ad spend is lost due to ad fraud in 2023.
• 30% of mobile ad spend is lost to ad fraud in 2023.
• $172 Billion of ad spend is projected to be lost due to ad fraud by 2028.
• $23 Billion per year can be recovered by using fraud mitigation platforms.

Solution. Fraud detection technology, such as Fraud Block, can detect and identify fraudulent or invalid traffic, impressions, clicks, or conversions on ads, helping to protect your campaign performance and ad budget.

What has Juniper Research said? Senior Research Analyst from Juniper Research, Elisha Sudlow-Poole, said in a statement:

• “Data provided by popular ad platforms, such as Facebook and Google, provide an incomplete picture of the success of advertising campaigns.”
• “That is, these platforms give an optimistic view of campaign efficiency, failing to distinguish between how many clicks or views originated from legitimate users compared to click farms or fraudulent bots.”

Deep dive. Download the full report by Juniper Research for more information.