Avoiding IVT on Your Site

How to keep your IVT rate within acceptable thresholds — auditing paid traffic sources, avoiding arbitrage, keeping software updated, and monitoring your real-time blocked session count.

Some level of bot and crawler traffic is unavoidable on any website. The goal is to keep your IVT rate within the thresholds expected for legitimate publisher inventory — typically under 10% for banner display. This article covers the most common sources of elevated IVT and what you can do about them.

Audit your traffic sources

The most important step is to understand where your traffic comes from. IVT is almost always concentrated in one or two acquisition channels.

Paid traffic (display, native, push): Traffic bought from low-quality ad networks often contains significant bot activity. If you run paid campaigns, check the traffic source's reputation and compare the bounce rate and session duration of that traffic against your organic baseline. A paid source where 80% of visitors bounce in under 1 second is a strong IVT signal.
Social media traffic: Legitimate social traffic is generally clean. "Social traffic" from unknown sources that doesn't correlate with any posts you made is suspicious.
SEO / organic: Generally low IVT. Bots that crawl for SEO are GIVT (identified, filtered automatically) and should not cause account issues.
Direct traffic: Unusually high direct traffic with no referrer and high bounce rates can indicate bot activity targeting your site specifically.

Avoid traffic arbitrage

Buying cheap traffic to monetise through ads — commonly known as traffic arbitrage — is one of the fastest ways to accumulate IVT. Networks that sell traffic for $0.01–$0.05 per visitor typically have extremely high fraud rates. Advlume's policies prohibit arbitrage traffic, and sites generating predominantly arbitrage traffic will be suspended.

Keep software and plugins updated

Compromised WordPress plugins and outdated CMS software can turn your site into an unwitting participant in ad fraud schemes (e.g. hidden iframes, ad injection). Keep your CMS, themes, and plugins up to date, and audit your installed plugins for anything you did not intentionally add.

Don't incentivise ad clicks

Asking visitors to click on ads ("click our ads to support us") or offering rewards for ad interactions is a form of incentivised invalid traffic. It violates both Advlume's policies and the policies of every demand partner in the network, and will trigger account suspension.

Be cautious with auto-refresh and interstitials

Refreshing pages aggressively to inflate impression counts, or using interstitial pages that force ad views, may generate inflated impression numbers but at low CPMs with high IVT rates. Advlume's smart refresh is already optimised for maximum legitimate impressions — do not add additional page refresh logic on top of it.

Monitor your blocked session count

The Live dashboard shows a blocked session count in real time. If you notice a spike in blocked sessions after starting a new traffic campaign, pause that source and investigate. A sustained blocked rate above 10% warrants an audit of all active traffic sources.