Pixalate Q3 2025 MFA Benchmarks Highlight Rising Ad Spend Risk on Made for Advertising Sites

Pixalate’s Q3 2025 Global Made for Advertising (MFA) Benchmarks Report for websites shows that MFA inventory continues to absorb a significant share of programmatic ad impressions, with high levels of invalid traffic and ad density. For PPC professionals and media buyers, this means a growing share of display and video budgets risk being served to low quality environments that distort performance data and hide click fraud.

We see this report as another clear signal that advertisers need stronger traffic quality controls, both on open programmatic inventory and on any campaigns that may route users through MFA-style pages before a final conversion.

What Pixalate’s Q3 2025 MFA benchmarks report covers

The Q3 2025 report focuses on websites identified as Made for Advertising across global open programmatic traffic. Pixalate analyzes multiple signals to classify MFA sites, then tracks impression volume, ad formats, invalid traffic rates and regional trends.

For PPC and performance marketers, these benchmarks are valuable because MFA domains often sit inside retargeting paths and display prospecting journeys. High exposure to MFA traffic can inflate reach metrics, increase remarketing pool sizes with low intent users and introduce more click fraud risk into Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns.

Key MFA findings from Q3 2025

Pixalate’s data highlights several patterns that should concern anyone responsible for media efficiency and traffic quality.

• Global coverage across regions: The report benchmarks MFA activity across major regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and other global markets, providing a comparative view of where MFA websites are most active.
• Programmatic display and video focus: The report focuses on open programmatic web inventory, where MFA publishers monetise through high ad density and aggressive refresh practices that can mask non-human and low quality activity.
• Invalid traffic exposure on MFA sites: Pixalate tracks invalid traffic rates on MFA domains, highlighting that a sizable share of impressions on these sites may not come from genuine users, which directly impacts view-through and click performance reporting.
• Ad density and user experience concerns: MFA websites typically show a high number of ads per page and aggressive layout patterns that encourage accidental clicks and quick bounces, which is particularly damaging for performance campaigns optimised on click-through metrics.
• Ongoing monitoring across quarters: As part of a recurring benchmark series, the Q3 2025 report allows advertisers to compare MFA activity over time and identify whether exposure is rising or falling in specific regions or inventory types.

The report is available from Pixalate and continues the company’s series of MFA benchmark studies for buyers who need more transparency into programmatic supply quality.

Why MFA benchmarks matter for PPC, click fraud and traffic quality

While MFA benchmarks focus on programmatic web impressions, the patterns they reveal have direct implications for PPC strategies. When display, discovery or performance max style campaigns place ads on MFA-heavy inventory, several issues emerge.

Inflated reach and weak intent

MFA pages are built to generate as many ad impressions and clicks as possible, often with repetitive or low value content. Users who land there typically have weak purchase intent. If a large portion of your display or video budget runs on MFA domains, remarketing lists quickly fill with users who are unlikely to convert, forcing your PPC campaigns to work harder for each sale or lead.

Higher risk of invalid clicks

Reports like Pixalate’s indicate that invalid traffic is more prevalent on MFA sites than on typical publisher domains. On the PPC side, that can translate into:

• Click spikes from unusual geographies or devices that do not align with your targeting
• Short session durations and repeated bouncing from ad to ad
• Suspiciously high click-through rates from specific placements that fail to produce downstream engagement

These patterns are classic signs of click fraud and automated traffic that consumes budget but never produces real customers.

Distorted performance data

MFA-heavy traffic inflates top-of-funnel metrics while depressing real business outcomes. Pixel fires, remarketing audiences and assisted conversion paths can all be polluted by low quality visitors. That makes it harder to evaluate the true role of Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads in driving revenue and often leads to poor optimisation decisions.

How advertisers should respond to Q3 2025 MFA trends

From our perspective at ClickPatrol, the latest MFA benchmarks should push advertisers to tighten their traffic quality controls alongside ongoing platform optimisations.

1. Review where your impressions and clicks originate

Even if you do not buy open programmatic inventory directly, your PPC campaigns may still show on MFA-like sites through display network placements and partner inventory. You should:

• Check placement reports in Google Ads for display and performance oriented campaigns
• Look for domains with high impressions and clicks but weak engagement and no conversions
• Use exclusion lists to remove obvious MFA-style sites from your campaigns

2. Strengthen click fraud and invalid traffic controls

MFA exposure often goes hand in hand with fake or low quality traffic. Relying only on platform level filters is not enough for most high spend accounts. You need independent monitoring that evaluates each click using behavioral and technical signals, so you can distinguish real users from automated or abusive activity in real time.

This is exactly where ClickPatrol fits in. Our systems analyze each click across many data points, identify fake and repeated interactions and automatically block abusive IPs and devices from seeing your ads again. That helps you reduce wasted spend on MFA-heavy and suspicious inventory and keeps your campaigns focused on genuine users.

3. Protect remarketing and conversion data

MFA traffic can silently pollute your remarketing and lookalike audiences. If a significant share of your tag fires comes from low intent visitors or non-human activity, your audience expansion and bidding algorithms will point in the wrong direction.

By filtering out invalid clicks before users enter your analytics and ad platforms, ClickPatrol helps keep your data cleaner. That means more accurate conversion rates, better audience quality and more reliable experiment results when you test new creatives or bidding strategies.

What this means for PPC budgets and ROI

The Q3 2025 MFA benchmarks confirm that MFA inventory remains a significant part of the programmatic ecosystem. If you do not actively manage exposure, more of your PPC and display budget will be wasted on non-performing placements and distorted by inflated metrics.

Advertisers that take MFA signals seriously and invest in better traffic quality controls tend to see:

• Lower effective cost per acquisition as fake and low intent clicks are removed
• More stable performance across markets, devices and placements
• Stronger confidence in reported results, especially for branded searches and retargeting campaigns

For many of the advertisers we work with, the combination of MFA-aware placement management and automated click blocking has been enough to recover a measurable share of monthly spend and reallocate it to higher intent channels or audiences.

Using Pixalate’s MFA benchmarks with ClickPatrol

Pixalate’s MFA benchmark series provides a useful outside view of where MFA activity is concentrated and how it evolves by quarter. When you combine that insight with your own campaign data and independent click fraud protection, you gain a much clearer picture of your real traffic quality.

At ClickPatrol, we recommend that PPC teams:

• Use MFA benchmarks as a risk map when planning new campaigns or entering new regions
• Cross check placement reports against known MFA characteristics and trends
• Run ClickPatrol to automatically detect and block fake, bot or repeated clicks across Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads

If you are seeing unexplained spend spikes, poor conversion rates from display traffic or suspicious remarketing performance, this is a good time to tighten controls. You can start a free trial of ClickPatrol or speak with us to review your traffic quality and identify where click fraud and MFA exposure may be eroding your ROI.

Abisola

Meet Abisola! As the content manager at ClickPatrol, she’s the go-to expert on all things fake traffic. From bot clicks to ad fraud, Abisola knows how to spot, stop, and educate others about the sneaky tactics that inflate numbers but don’t bring real results.

View all posts by Abisola (Abisola)

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