For years, the digital advertising ecosystem has struggled with a fundamental challenge: validating that each click represents genuine users with intent. Digital advertising loses its meaning when a significant portion of traffic is fraudulent, non-human, or lacks actual buying intent. As advertisers increasingly prioritize performance metrics and shift from cost-per-mille(CPM) to cost-per-click (CPC)-based models as their measure of campaign success, fraud tactics have evolved in sophistication – making robust click validation crucial for platforms to preserve advertiser trust and accurately measure return on ad spend.
Today, HUMAN Security has launched Ad Click Defense, a new solution designed specifically to help advertising platforms protect revenue and maintain advertiser trust by allowing them to detect and filter invalid clicks that would otherwise compromise campaign performance and measurement.
HUMAN’s comprehensive approach to click validation and click fraud protection
Ad Click Defense leverages HUMAN’s network of more than 20 trillion digital interactions weekly across 3 billion unique devices to provide unrivaled click validation accuracy. Unlike alternative solutions that rely solely on device signals or landing page activity, HUMAN’s Ad Click Defense identifies invalid clicks and analyzes actual click behavior in real-time with proprietary detection technology.
“In today’s performance-driven advertising landscape, marketers need to know their budgets are driving genuine engagement,” said Jay Benach, GM Media Security at HUMAN. “Our Ad Click Defense solution analyzes then empowers platforms to filter click and touch events at the transaction level, rather than broadly clustering and merely labelling them as suspicious. This solution reinforces our commitment to supporting a fraud-free digital ecosystem, which now extends to many unique and additional platforms, especially those that exclusively offer high-performance click traffic.”
As users engage with advertisements, Ad Click Defense identifies subtle indicators of both sophisticated (SIVT) and general (GIVT) invalid click traffic. These indicators include suspicious click patterns (such as multiple rapid clicks from the same source), behavioral anomalies (like clicks without expected mouse movement), timing inconsistencies, and discrepancies between click and impression data. This precise differentiation is essential for platforms to filter out fraudulent traffic accurately while preserving genuine user engagement. This precise differentiation enables platforms to:
- Minimize billing disputes and optimize spend allocation, by validating legitimate clicks.
- Give advertisers confidence to scale with transparent, accurate campaign metrics.
- Detect invalid clicks with real-time detection that preserves campaign effectiveness.
Key capabilities for click fraud protection
Ad Click Defense delivers powerful click validation through three core capabilities:
- Advanced IVT detection: Highly precise and reliable invalid traffic detection, leveraging extensive measurement coverage across the ecosystem with 20 trillion transactions verified weekly across 3 billion unique devices monthly. Powered by 400+ detection algorithms across the HUMAN Defense Platform, Ad Click Defense identifies sophisticated patterns that conventional solutions may miss.
- Real-time validation: Unlike solutions that analyze after the fact, Ad Click Defense provides real-time detection at the time of click. This unique approach analyzes actual click behavior patterns—not just device signals or landing page data—to identify valid versus invalid clicks.
- Actionable insights: Beyond just detection, Ad Click Defense delivers truly actionable IVT detection and classification of both sophisticated (SIVT) and general (GIVT) invalid clicks or touch events. Advertising platforms are able to filter invalid or manipulated interactions from billing systems, performance reports, as well as integrate IVT decisions into dynamic optimization models for real-time campaign adjustments.
Why layered protection across the entire ad journey is essential
Every moment of the advertising lifecycle is a different moment that can, sadly, be manipulated. Organizations need to protect both impressions and clicks to secure the complete advertising journey. Given that most performance campaigns are run on a CPC, CPA, or other action-based attribution models, protection of the click path itself is essential.
Click fraud occurs independently from impression fraud and requires a layered approach to protection. For example, fraudulent clicks may fire hours or even days after a legitimate impression was served. Fraudsters design sophisticated schemes to game the system by appearing legitimate during the ad serving process, then exploiting vulnerabilities in the click path.
Such schemes require click-specific detection mechanisms to identify anomalies, working alongside impression-level protection to create a comprehensive security framework. This layered approach is particularly important as advertising platforms face mounting pressure to make sure every click represents genuine user engagement and return on ad spend.
A new standard in click validation
Ad Click Defense adds to HUMAN’s comprehensive protection for ad tech platforms, providing advertisers with confidence that their campaigns are protected at every stage from sophisticated fraud. With the addition of Ad Click Defense to our comprehensive suite of media protection solutions, HUMAN can now provide platforms with protection on the critical path from impression to click.
Ready to deliver valid clicks and verified value? Reach out to HUMAN to learn how Ad Click Defense can transform your platform’s click validation capabilities.