Display & Programmatic

Bot traffic

Bot traffic on display and programmatic campaigns

Sophisticated and general invalid traffic accounts for up to 40% of open exchange impressions, burning your display budget on placements no real person ever sees.

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Trusted by leading brands worldwide

SIVT and GIVT are endemic to the open exchange RTB environment

The RTB auction environment processes billions of impressions per day at speeds no human reviewer can match. That speed advantage is exploited by bot networks that generate sophisticated invalid traffic, or SIVT, alongside general invalid traffic, or GIVT, across millions of publisher domains. Industry-wide estimates put the IVT rate on open exchange inventory at 20-40%, meaning a significant share of every programmatic display budget reaches no real audience. Bot operators are paid on every impression they serve, creating a direct financial incentive to scale operations.

Standard brand safety tools are built to screen content, not traffic quality. They can flag a publisher domain as unsafe from a brand adjacency perspective, but they cannot distinguish a real human viewing that publisher from a bot simulating the impression. Tapper analyses traffic at the device and behavioural level, identifying bot signatures including non-human interaction patterns, headless browser fingerprints, and datacenter IP ranges, to filter invalid traffic before it inflates your impression counts and corrupts your viewability metrics.

How Tapper stops bot traffic on Display

Three steps from connection to clean data, no engineering required.

Integrate across your programmatic stack

Tapper connects to your DSP or ad server and begins monitoring impression and click data across all inventory tiers, from open exchange to private marketplace deals.

Bot signatures detected at the traffic level

Behavioural analysis, device fingerprinting, and IP reputation scoring identify SIVT and GIVT patterns, including headless browsers, datacenter IPs, and non-human interaction signatures.

Invalid inventory suppressed and blocklists updated automatically

High-fraud inventory sources are added to ongoing suppression lists applied to your future buying, reducing bot exposure with every campaign cycle.

Bot traffic by the numbers

Data from Tapper's platform analysis and published industry research.

20-40%

Average IVT rate on open exchange programmatic

$84B

Lost globally to ad fraud annually

17%

Of programmatic ads served to non-human traffic

Higher fraud on open exchange vs private marketplace

Tapper vs Standard Brand Safety Tools

See exactly where the gaps are, and why they matter to your bottom line.

Capability

Tapper

Standard Brand Safety Tools

SIVT detection

Behavioural and fingerprint analysis per impression

Known-bad domain and IP lists only

GIVT filtering

Automated and continuous

Periodic batch filtering

Blocklist update speed

Automated and instant

Manual or weekly updates

Viewability impact

Filters bot traffic before viewability is measured

Viewability measured after invalid impressions served

Success stories

Trusted by industry leaders

See how companies are protecting their ad budgets and improving ROI with Tapper.

“Tapper played a key role in improving the efficiency of Du's performance marketing activity by addressing traffic quality issues within campaigns. Following implementation, Du achieved a 13% reduction in CPA and an 8.6% increase in order rate, demonstrating a clear improvement in conversion quality and overall campaign effectiveness.”

Joseph Elbcherrawy

Client Leadership Director, Mindshare, a WPP Media Brand

“During our Tapper trial for INFINITI, we uncovered low-quality traffic that wasn't visible inside the platforms. Removing it delivered a 14% uplift in conversions and an 11.4% reduction in CPA - a meaningful efficiency gain for INFINITI's 2026 growth plans.”

David Barnes

Data & Technology Lead, Omnicom Group

“With Tapper's protection we were able to identify and block invalid clicks in real time. The impact was immediate as our cost per acquisition dropped by 30% and ROAS improved significantly. More importantly, Tapper gives us the confidence that our campaigns are reaching genuine customers, which makes it truly invaluable.”

Dimitris Bakas

Senior Performance Marketing, Public Group

“We started using Tapper to get better visibility on where our clicks were coming from, and ended up cutting wasted spend by over 12%. The performance uplift was clear, and for the first time, we could trust the numbers we were seeing. It's a total game-changer for campaign integrity.”

Stuart Parkin

Director of Operations, Regit

“Tapper's blocking technology purifies our paid media traffic which roughly equates to a 36x return against its subscription costs. It's certainly one of the easiest-to-implement tools in our entire marketing stack.”

Reno Mindemann

Head of Growth, Kama Capital

“We've been using Tapper for over a year now, and it has become a core part of how we run paid media. Invalid traffic was always something we knew existed but couldn't really act on. Tapper changed that. We're now saving up to $50K per year, and on PureSquare specifically, we saw around a 20% decrease in CPA. Based on these results, we decided to roll it out across other ventures under Disrupt as well.”

Nurkan Kirkan

GTM Consultant / Paid Growth, Disrupt.com

Trusted by leading brands worldwide

Frequently asked questions

Everything you need to know about stopping bot traffic on Display & Programmatic.

GIVT, or general invalid traffic, includes basic bot crawlers and data centre traffic that can be identified by known IP ranges and user agent lists. SIVT, or sophisticated invalid traffic, uses advanced techniques including residential proxies, browser simulation, and human-like behaviour to evade standard detection. SIVT is far harder to filter and accounts for a growing share of programmatic fraud.

Brand safety tools are designed to screen content adjacency, ensuring your ad does not appear next to harmful or off-brand content. They operate at the domain level and cannot analyse the traffic quality of individual impressions. A domain can pass brand safety checks while serving a majority of its traffic from bot networks.

Industry averages put open exchange IVT between 20-40%, though rates vary significantly by vertical, geography, and inventory tier. Tapper can audit your existing programmatic data to estimate current fraud exposure before full deployment.