Q1 2024
Ad Quality Report
CONTENTS:
- Top Malvertising Attack Vectors
- Regional Malicious Activity
- Pre & Post-Click Attacks
- Device Targeting
- Malicious SSP Index
- Ad Content Filtering Trends
GeoEdge’s Ad Quality Report examines the prevalence and origins of malvertising attacks on global devices across channels. Here’s how AdTech fared in early 2024:
- This quarter, US and UK malvertising attacks skyrocketed to a rate of 1 in 75 impressions.
- Misleading Product Offers and Auto Redirects pose significant threats as the primary attack vectors following an assault by ScamClub leveraging malicious VAST tags.
- Google remains a top malicious SSP while nearly all major SSP infection rates rose in Q1.
From 2023- 2024, GeoEdge monitored and analyzed billions of advertising impressions across premium websites, apps, and SSPs to compile the research presented in this article. The data was collected using GeoEdge’s real-time ad security solution, which enables the measurement of quality and blocking of malvertising across devices and channels on live impressions.
Top Malvertising Attack Vectors Q1 2024
Misleading product offers and auto-redirects stand out as the most significant threats to the advertising ecosystem to date. Although auto-redirects show a decrease from the 2023 average, they still linger at a 25%, a significant share associated with the Scamclub VAST redirect campaign. Meanwhile, malicious extensions, add-ons, and financial scams persist as persistent threats. Q1 has also experienced a concerning rise in tech support scams, coinciding with a decline in gift card scams.
Regional Malicious Activity
Malicious Ads / All Ads Served
Pre & Post-Click Attacks:
Device Targeting:
Malicious SSP Index
Malicious Ads vs All Ads Served
Google’s infection rate has slightly decreased from last year’s average of 1.25% but remains a top distributor of malicious ads, with 0.98% flagged as malicious. SSP06 has hit its worst performance yet, with almost 3% of its ads blocked for being malicious. SSP10, usually a high-quality SSP, saw its infection index peak at 0.86% this quarter—nearly three times higher than its 2023 score of 0.29%—due to financial scams and misleading offers targeting desktop users in the US and Canada.
Meanwhile, SSP12’s negative trend from Q4 continued into this quarter, with its malicious index climbing to an unprecedented 2.56%. This rise, primarily in January, was fueled by a significant number of financial and fake antivirus scam ads circulated by SSP12 in the US and Italy.
Ad Content Filtering Trends
Top 10 Restricted Ad Content in the USA and Canada
U.S. publishers are actively filtering a diverse range of ad categories to maintain content integrity and comply with regulations. This includes ads related to gambling, weapons, news, marijuana, law, government and politics, weight loss, pharmaceuticals, intimate apparel, and health.
With the onset of election season, publishers are beginning to see an influx of 2024 Election ads, prompting some to block them entirely, now accounting for 3% of all content blocks under the U.S. elections category.
The Leading 10 Blocked Ad Content in Europe
In the European digital advertising landscape, content blocking trends reveal a strong aversion towards gambling ads, with 40% of publishers choosing to block such content. Following closely behind, swimwear and intimate apparel ads are also frequently blocked, comprising 22% of the content blocks.
Meanwhile, digital publishers display a notable restraint towards political and governmental content, as well as health-related ads, each constituting 9% and 8% of blocked content.
Top 10 blocked categories APAC
In APAC, gambling advertisements dominate the content blocks, with a substantial 50% of publishers opting to restrict such content. Tobacco promotions follow closely behind, constituting 27% of the blocked material, reflecting a stringent approach towards potentially harmful products.
News, pharmaceuticals, and governmental creatives each make up 5% of the blocked content.
