Ad Fraud Intelligence from the Front Lines

Ad Fraud Rates in Various Channels: Which Are Most Impacted by Invalid Traffic?

Ad fraud rates vary dramatically by channel. Based on the Opticks Ad Fraud Report 2025 (2B+ clicks, 500+ advertisers, 243 territories, Jan 2025–Mar 2026), native and programmatic advertising now carry the highest invalid traffic rates, while affiliate marketing and organic search are safer than most marketers assume.

4 Click Fraud Detection Techniques to Protect Your Campaigns

As losses due to ad fraud continue to grow exponentially, ad fraud detection should be a priority for marketers and advertisers everywhere.

Introducing IP Raccoon: IP Risk Scoring Beyond Ad Clicks

Opticks is launching IP Raccoon, a new IP risk-scoring API for fraud and bot detection beyond ad clicks — account takeover, signup abuse, and more.

7 signs of bot traffic in GA4, a step-by-step check you can run today, and why GA4’s built-in filters miss most invalid traffic — with real Opticks data.

Hunter becomes the prey: how Opticks handled a mass-registration bot attack

Over the past few weeks our own platform was targeted by a mass registration bot attack. The attack was simple in shape but loud in consequences, and dealing with it gave us a useful opportunity to put our own product through a real-world stress test. A mass registration bot attack begins The pattern was straightforward: [...]

How to Lower Your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

B2C (business-to-consumer) companies invest around 9.6% of their revenue in their marketing efforts, and B2B (business-to-business) firms invest even more at 11.8%. With such a big portion of budgets going to marketing, these companies need to know how to lower customer acquisition cost without spending blindly. One effective way to do that is to use [...]

What Are Click Farms And How to Protect Your Ads From Them

The digital advertising industry depends on consumer clicks. In theory, the more ad clicks the better.

The Early Signs of Ad Fraud You Need to Be Aware Of

You’ve seen a sudden spike in campaign traffic and unusually high click-through rates (CTRs). Your first reaction is to be pleased that your campaign is making inroads where others haven’t. But, when it comes to ad campaigns, if something seems strange, it probably is.

The Dark Side of AI: How Fraudsters Exploit ChatGPT for Ad Fraud

The rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT is opening the door to a new kind of ChatGPT ad fraud. At the same time, it’s handing digital marketers an endless number of opportunities, including quicker, cheaper ad content.

How Fraudulent App Publishers Are Draining Your Advertising Budget

Millions of Android users and countless developers publish apps worldwide. That means you need to block every fraudulent app before it can cause damage.

What Are Click Bots and How Can You Prevent Them?

Invalid traffic is a huge problem for marketers. Click fraud is a significant driver of this type of traffic, and it occurs when invalid or illegitimate clicks are made by malicious software, bots, or competitors. Click fraud is carried out using various techniques such as clickjacking, click spamming, click injections, and click bots.

Mobile App Fraud: How Fraudsters Fake Traffic in Famous Mainstream Apps

Not content with just faking clicks and impressions on display ads, fraudsters are increasingly turning to mobile app fraud. They use sophisticated ad fraud techniques to fake traffic from mainstream apps like Facebook and TikTok.

2023 Ad Fraud App List & How to Use It to Protect Your Campaigns

Are you — like many other advertisers and marketers — struggling with the weight of manually reviewing websites for ad placements and double-checking potentially fraudulent audiences through IPs? A reliable ad fraud app list can take that manual work off your plate.

How Invalid Traffic and Ad Fraud Limit Your SEO Efforts

What many marketers suspected for a long time has finally been confirmed: Organic traffic fraud, or invalid traffic, harms SEO.

Proxy Types: Which Are the Most Harmful to Advertisers?

Proxy traffic in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Internet users have been using proxies for many years to evade location-based rules and protect their identity. In the hands of fraudsters, however, the use of proxies poses huge threats to advertisers, their campaigns, and their ad spend.

The Biggest Ad Fraud Cases and What We Can Learn From Them

Ad fraud is showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, the latest data indicates that it will cost businesses a colossal €120 billion by 2023. But even more worrying is that fraudsters’ tactics are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Even big-name companies such as Uber, Procter & Gamble, and Verizon have been victims of ad fraud [...]

Can You Detect Fake Clicks in TikTok?

Despite only entering the advertising game in 2019, TikTok has quickly snapped up a sizable portion of overall digital ad spend. Analysts project the platform’s ad revenue will hit 2.4% of digital ad spending in 2022, a colossal jump from just 1% in 2021.

How to Protect Your Campaigns Against Ad Fraud During Black Friday

Black Friday — one of the biggest sales periods of the year — is right around the corner. What was once a single day in November has turned into a week-long period of huge shopping sales.

How Fraudsters Use Bots to Attack Your Google Search Campaigns

Almost half of all web traffic is made of bots. But while some are good bots, others have been made with the wrong intentions.