Report Warns Digital Advertising Could Lose $63 Billion To Invalid Traffic In 2025

A new global forecast on invalid traffic suggests that advertisers risk losing around $63 billion in digital ad spend in 2025, with programmatic and connected TV formats flagged as particularly exposed. For PPC teams, this is not an abstract security issue: it directly affects how much of your Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads budget ever reaches genuine users, and how reliable your performance data really is.

Invalid traffic forecast: how big is the problem?

The report projects that invalid traffic will siphon off tens of billions of dollars across digital channels in 2025, with the $63 billion figure highlighting how entrenched non-human and low-quality activity has become in the ad ecosystem. This covers a spectrum of issues, from sophisticated bots and spoofed devices to stacked ads and traffic from incentivised or misrepresented placements.

From our perspective at ClickPatrol, this scale of loss is consistent with what we see in live PPC accounts: a small share of bad traffic can quickly snowball into very large budget leakage when campaigns are scaled or when advertisers expand into higher-CPM environments such as CTV or premium video.

Key findings on 2025 invalid traffic losses

The forecasted numbers in the report underline just how material invalid traffic has become for performance marketers. Among the headline data points:

• Digital advertising is projected to lose approximately $63 billion to invalid traffic in 2025.
• Programmatic buying and automated inventory sourcing are highlighted as key drivers of exposure to non-human and low-quality traffic.
• CTV and video formats are identified as high-risk areas, with complex supply chains and higher prices creating strong incentives for fraud.
• Open web display and app inventory remain vulnerable to bot traffic, fake users and manipulated placements.
• Advertisers that rely solely on platform-side invalid traffic filters are expected to remain exposed to a significant share of this projected loss.

For PPC specialists managing performance budgets, these figures are not just about brand safety or industry headlines. They point to a direct hit on cost per acquisition, ROAS and the accuracy of attribution models that depend on click and impression quality.

Why invalid traffic keeps growing despite platform safeguards

Most ad platforms already apply basic invalid traffic filters. However, the report’s projections indicate that these safeguards are not enough to curb the overall growth of IVT. In our experience, there are three main reasons:

• Incentives in the supply chain: High CPM and CPC environments encourage bad actors to create fake impressions and clicks, especially in CTV, mobile apps and long-tail sites.
• Gaps between platforms: When you run campaigns across Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads, each platform sees only its own slice of activity. Patterns that look normal in isolation can look suspicious once you join data across platforms, devices and IP ranges.
• Evolving tactics: Fraudsters constantly adjust behavior, user agents and device signals to exploit new inventory types and measurement gaps. Static rule sets and generic filters tend to lag behind.

As a result, advertisers still see repeated clicks from the same users, automated browsing behavior that mimics humans, and traffic from regions, devices or placements that never convert yet continue to eat into budget.

What $63bn in IVT means for PPC budgets and performance

For a typical performance marketer, the threat is not that 100 percent of spend is fake. The risk is that a modest but persistent share of invalid traffic quietly inflates click and impression counts while producing little or no downstream value.

On search and social campaigns, this often shows up as:

• Rising costs per click with stable or declining conversion rates.
• Spikes in traffic from new placements or apps that never produce sales or qualified leads.
• Retargeting audiences bloated with users who never really engaged in the first place.
• Attribution reports that over-credit campaigns which actually drive low-quality visits.

Even a 5 to 10 percent slice of invalid traffic across a multi-million-dollar annual budget can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in waste. At the same time, it distorts your testing, making it harder to identify winning keywords, audiences and creatives, and slowing down optimization cycles.

Why advertisers need independent invalid traffic detection

The report’s 2025 forecast reinforces a point we regularly discuss with clients: platform-level filters alone are not enough to protect serious PPC budgets. Platforms have to balance fraud prevention with user privacy, scale and revenue, which often leads to conservative blocking thresholds.

An independent layer focused solely on traffic quality gives advertisers more control. At ClickPatrol, we look at many behavioral and technical data points per click, including repetition patterns, timing, engagement behavior and signals connected to devices and IPs. When we see evidence that a click is likely to be fake, automated or abusive, we automatically block that user from seeing your ads again using the native exclusion tools in Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads.

The impact is twofold. First, budgets are shielded from repeated and non-human activity. Second, your campaign data gets cleaner, which makes it easier to read experiments, trust performance lifts and roll out proven strategies with more confidence.

Practical steps for PPC teams in light of the 2025 IVT forecast

Given the projected $63 billion in invalid traffic losses, PPC practitioners should treat fraud and low-quality traffic as a continuous optimization problem, not a one-off audit. Based on what we see across many accounts, a practical response includes:

• Monitor abnormal patterns: Watch for placements, apps, domains or geos with high click volumes and near-zero conversions, as well as sudden spikes in traffic without a clear marketing cause.
• Use platform exclusions proactively: Regularly refine placement and app exclusions, IP exclusions and geo targeting to remove obvious sources of bad traffic.
• Segment by device and inventory type: Break out CTV, mobile app, video and display campaigns where possible so you can monitor performance and tighten controls on high-risk segments.
• Add independent protection: Use a dedicated click fraud protection tool such as ClickPatrol to continuously analyze traffic quality and automatically block suspicious users from seeing your ads.
• Rebuild reporting on clean data: Once you reduce invalid traffic, revisit your CPA and ROAS benchmarks, as you may find that some channels or campaigns perform better than earlier, noisy data suggested.

Cleaner traffic, better optimization decisions

The projected $63 billion invalid traffic loss for 2025 is a reminder that performance marketing is only as strong as its underlying data. When fake, bot or abusive clicks are removed, optimization insights become more reliable and the true winners in your account are easier to spot.

ClickPatrol focuses on exactly that outcome. By automatically detecting and blocking fake or repeated clicks in Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads, we protect your budget and restore confidence in your metrics. For advertisers who want to stress-test their exposure ahead of 2025, starting a free trial or speaking to our team about a traffic quality review is a practical next step.

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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