Question 1

What is ad fraud, and how much of it is there?

Accepted Answer

Any activity that generates payable advertising events — impressions, clicks, installs, conversions — **without a genuine human being exposed to the advertisement**. Estimates of its scale vary enormously and the honest answer is that nobody knows precisely, which is itself part of the problem.

**The main forms:**

**Bot traffic**, where automated software generates impressions and clicks, sometimes from **residential proxies or malware-infected devices** specifically to look like ordinary users.

**Domain spoofing**, where low-quality inventory is sold as if it were a premium publisher's.

**Ad stacking and pixel stuffing**, where many advertisements are layered on top of each other or rendered in a single pixel, so all are counted as served and none are visible.

**Click injection and click spamming** in mobile, firing clicks just before an install so the fraudster claims attribution for an organic download.

**SDK spoofing**, fabricating install events entirely.

**Made-for-advertising sites**, which are not fraud in the strict sense but are built purely to carry advertising, with scraped or generated content and a high proportion of the page given to ads.

**Attribution fraud**, the most insidious, where the fraudster does not fabricate traffic but positions themselves to be credited for conversions that would have happened anyway.

**Why it persists.** The supply chain is long and opaque, intermediaries take a cut regardless of quality, and — uncomfortably — **fraud makes everyone's numbers look better**. An agency measured on impressions has weak incentives to find that some were fake.

**The defences:** buying from **verified inventory** using authorisation standards that let publishers declare who may sell their inventory; third-party verification and viewability measurement; **incrementality testing**, which is the strongest defence because fake traffic cannot produce real lift; allowlists rather than open exchanges; and scrutinising suspiciously good performance, since **unusually cheap and well-performing inventory is the classic signature**.

**The practical stance:** treat platform-reported conversions as a claim rather than a fact, and validate against your own business outcomes.

Question 2

How does affiliate marketing actually work, and who gets paid for what?

Accepted Answer

A performance model where a third party — a publisher, creator or comparison site — sends traffic to a merchant and is paid only when a defined action occurs, usually a sale. The mechanics are

Question 3

What is marketing attribution and why do platforms all claim the same conversion?

Accepted Answer

Attribution is the process of deciding which marketing touchpoints deserve credit for a conversion. It sounds administrative and it is one of the hardest problems in the discipline. Why the numbers

Question 4

What is programmatic advertising and real-time bidding?

Accepted Answer

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of ad inventory through software, replacing the negotiated deals that dominated media buying historically. Real-time bidding (RTB) is the

Question 5

How do ad blockers affect marketing measurement?

Accepted Answer

They remove a non-random slice of your audience from the data, which distorts more than the raw blocking rate suggests — and the browsers themselves now do much of the blocking, independently of

Question 6

Why can a high click-through rate be a bad sign?

Accepted Answer

Click-through rate (CTR) is clicks divided by impressions. It measures how compelling something looked — not whether the click was worth having. A high CTR paired with poor downstream results usually

Question 7

What rules actually govern advertising, and what does the ASA do?

Accepted Answer

Advertising in the UK sits under a co-regulatory system: industry-written codes enforced by a self-regulatory body, backed by statutory regulators who can act where self-regulation fails.

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