Why in-game may have less general invalid traffic & what that means for advertisers

The ways in which brands connect with consumers continue to evolve, yet a marketer’s imperative remains the same: to meaningfully connect with their target audience.

And because of gaming’s inherently social nature, it presents a ripe opportunity to meet consumers where they are. The audience is more diverse than ever. Popular gamers have garnered massive followings, including millions of loyal, tight-knit fans. Plus, the dynamic nature of each game offers a natural environment to engage with consumers in a way that’s relevant - and perhaps even welcome.
 

Transparency & trust must be the baseline

Yet growth in this burgeoning channel requires trust and transparency to facilitate confidence in the media buy. Worldwide digital ad spend is expected to reach $526 billion by 2024, and ad fraud remains a persistent concern for marketers, as fraudsters are eager to try to exploit new formats.

Assuaging advertiser fears requires vigilant invalid traffic (IVT) monitoring and detection. That’s why Anzu.io and Oracle Moat have joined forces to provide impression delivery and general invalid traffic (GIVT) measurement across its platform - a crucial first step to ensure advertiser confidence. This pilot collaboration optimises the advertising experience, giving publishers, agencies, and advertisers access to trusted third-party measurement for 3D in-game ad campaigns.
 

What is general invalid traffic (GIVT)?

While IVT is often conflated with ad fraud, not all invalid traffic is malicious. Still, detecting all forms of IVT is essential to protecting ad spend and ensuring impressions are valid and viewable, especially on new channels like in-game.

That includes GIVT, a type of IVT that includes data centre traffic, spiders, and excessive activity - many of which are routine non-human traffic and are woven into the fabric of how the internet works. This type of IVT is not typically intended to be harmful and therefore won’t ever be zero per cent, but it’s still pertinent to monitor to ensure you’re not paying for non-human impressions or experiencing abnormalities. There are three types of GIVT:

• Data centre traffic: This is the most prevalent form of GIVT in gaming and other environments. It’s not typical to have anything other than the client device send measurement events. When it comes from a Data Centre IP and it’s not a declared Spider or known proxy, it’s best to filter
• Spider: Web crawlers, search engines, and various automated services declare themselves in the IAB/ABC International Spiders and Bots List or their User Agents. Typically, if a bot is well-behaved, it will visit a site’s robots.txt page first to get instructions on what it should and should not be viewing. But if it happens to skip that step and load an ad, it will be filtered as GIVT
• Excessive activity: This detection flags user sessions that generate ad impression volumes that are not humanly possible as invalid

While GIVT metrics fluctuate greatly between different channels, Moat Q4 2020 benchmarks show that mobile in-app and desktop environments have an average GIVT rate of about 0.4% and 2.9%, respectively.
 

Why GIVT might be lower in-game

As for GIVT within in-game environments, this type of IVT may be less likely because many multiplayer games block VPN traffic, which is one way fraudulent ads may gain access. Consoles don’t have VPN apps and usually connect via residential IP, so this may reduce GIVT as well.

And while data centre traffic may exist, spiders and crawlers are not native to the gaming environment. This in turn significantly reduces the impact of this common type of GIVT.

With any new market, there are inherent risks, yet one way to address them is through partnerships that put transparency at the forefront. With proper measurement and validation mechanisms in place, brands can protect their ad dollars, legitimate publishers can profit, and both can avoid enriching fraudsters.

Advertisers are already comfortable with existing digital marketing tools, which allow them to measure effectiveness and gauge the value of their ad spend. As an emerging media, it’s important for blended in-game advertising to provide advertisers with similar standards and verification tools. That way, marketers develop trust in the medium and feel equally comfortable tapping into gaming as they do across other digital channels.
 

Working toward industry tools & standards for gaming

For this channel to continue to grow, we need to provide marketers with the ability to measure the effectiveness of blended in-game advertising with the same tools they use to measure existing media channels - while considering the nuances of gaming environments.

To achieve this, we will continue to work together and with the wider industry to build additional robust measurement capabilities, including viewability, attention analytics, and more across in-game media.