• by Ray Schultz , July 7, 2024

Invalid traffic (IVT), including some resulting from ad fraud, contributed to a double-digit failure rate for web traffic with a Supply Chain Object (SCO) in Q1, Pixalate reports. 

An SCO allows buyers and intermediaries to view all parties selling or reselling open programmatic advertising inventory.

Of all SCO web traffic that was seen, 14% failed Pixalate’s SCO verification -- a process that examines open programmatic advertising SCO across desktop and mobile web, while also measuring its impact on IVT, including ad fraud.

In addition, there was a 42% higher IVR rate when a supposed "complete" chain failed SCO verification and a 100% greater rate when an SCO was incomplete, when compared to verified supply paths.  

The biggest cause of failure was unauthorized sellers. 

“One of the most surprising findings was that unauthorized sellers accounted for 77% of SCO verification failures on web traffic, 65% on mobile app traffic, and 63% on CTV traffic,” says Amit Shetty, vice president of product for Pixalate. “This challenges the prevalent belief that digital advertising has been ‘secured’ by ads.txt and app-ads.txt, highlighting the need for stricter enforcement of the ads.txt and SCO verification checks.”

Other web traffic verification failures fell into these categories: 

• Unauthorized reseller — 5%
• No ads.txt file found — 3% 
• Unable to resolve sellers.json — 6% 
• Missing publisher node — 10% 

The data-science team at Pixalate analyzed over 25 billion open programmatic advertising impressions containing the OpenRTB SupplyChain Object (SCO) during Q1 2024. 

The methodology also seeks to do the following (and we quote):

• Ensure that the first node in the chain is connecting to a publisher
• Confirm that the seller in the first node is listed as a direct seller in the publisher’s ads.txt/app-ads.txt 
• Confirm that the sellers in all other nodes are listed as resellers in the publisher’s ads.txt/app-ads.txt 
• Check the relationships between the sellers using sellers.json data.