How DV360 Prevents Invalid Traffic and Ad Fraud

Why Invalid Traffic and Ad Fraud Matter

Every impression you buy programmatically should reach a real person with a genuine chance to engage. Invalid traffic (IVT) and ad fraud undermine that promise — draining budget on bots, hidden ads, spoofed domains and manipulated clicks. For performance teams, fraud distorts your conversion data and misleads optimisation. For brand teams, it erodes the trust that measurement depends on.

Display & Video 360 (DV360) sits inside the Google Marketing Platform and inherits a mature, multi-layered defence against IVT. Understanding how those layers work — and which controls are in your hands — is essential to protecting spend and getting clean data out of the platform.

This guide breaks down how DV360 detects and filters fraud, what it does automatically, and the settings your team should actively configure.

The Two Categories of Invalid Traffic

The industry, aligned with the Media Rating Council (MRC) and TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group), splits IVT into two types:

• General Invalid Traffic (GIVT): Straightforward, rules-based invalid activity such as known data-centre traffic, declared bots, and crawlers on published lists. This is relatively easy to identify and filter.
• Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT): Harder to detect activity designed to mimic real users — hijacked devices, botnets, domain spoofing, ad stacking, hidden ads and falsified location or identity signals.

DV360's protections span both categories, combining automated filtering with configurable verification and third-party integrations.

How DV360 Filters Invalid Traffic Automatically

Platform-level detection and filtering

DV360 uses Google's ad traffic quality systems — the same infrastructure that protects Google Ads and Ad Manager. These systems analyse signals at massive scale to identify and remove invalid activity, often before an impression is even served. When IVT is detected, affected impressions and clicks are filtered from reporting, and Google's policy is not to charge advertisers for traffic identified as invalid.

Key mechanisms include:

• Pre-bid filtering: Suspicious inventory and traffic sources are screened before bids are placed, reducing exposure to fraudulent requests.
• Real-time signal analysis: Machine-learning models evaluate patterns across billions of events to flag anomalies indicative of bots or manipulation.
• Post-serve filtering: Impressions later identified as invalid are removed from your metrics so your reported numbers reflect valid activity.

Supply chain transparency

A large share of programmatic fraud historically came from domain spoofing and unauthorised reselling. DV360 helps counter this through industry standards:

• ads.txt and app-ads.txt: DV360 respects these authorised-seller files, helping ensure you buy inventory only from publishers' declared sellers.
• sellers.json and the SupplyChain Object (schain): These provide visibility into every intermediary between you and the publisher, exposing opaque or suspicious resale paths.

Buying through authorised, transparent supply routes is one of the most effective structural defences against spoofed inventory.

Verified inventory and direct deals

Inventory quality correlates strongly with fraud risk. DV360 lets you prioritise:

• Programmatic Guaranteed and Preferred Deals with known publishers.
• Private marketplaces (PMPs) with vetted supply.
• Google-owned and operated inventory such as YouTube, which carries strong native protections.

The more you concentrate spend on verified, direct supply, the smaller your exposure to open-exchange fraud.

The Controls Your Team Should Configure

Automated filtering is powerful, but DV360 also gives you levers that materially reduce fraud exposure. These should be part of every campaign setup.

Brand safety and suitability settings

DV360 includes native brand safety controls plus integrations with accredited third-party verification vendors. Use them to:

• Apply content and inventory filters that exclude low-quality or high-risk placements.
• Enable third-party verification services (for example, from accredited media-quality vendors) for pre-bid targeting and post-bid measurement.
• Set floors on viewability and invalid-traffic thresholds where supported.

Inventory sources and exclusions

• Restrict open-exchange buying where fraud risk is highest, or layer it with strict verification.
• Build and maintain exclusion lists of poor-performing or suspicious domains and apps.
• Use inventory allow-lists for sensitive campaigns to limit delivery to trusted publishers.

Viewability targeting

While viewability is not the same as fraud, hidden and stacked ads are common fraud tactics. Setting viewability goals through DV360's pre-bid targeting helps filter placements engineered to fake impressions.

App and environment controls

Mobile in-app inventory carries distinct SIVT risks. Confirm app-ads.txt compliance, exclude apps with anomalous performance, and monitor spikes in install or engagement metrics that don't match downstream conversions.

Native vs. Configurable Protections at a Glance

Protection layer	What it addresses	Automatic in DV360	Requires your configuration
Google traffic-quality filtering	GIVT and SIVT detection	Yes	No
ads.txt / sellers.json / schain	Spoofing, unauthorised resale	Yes (respected)	Prioritise transparent supply
Brand safety & suitability filters	Risky/low-quality content	Partial defaults	Yes — tune per campaign
Third-party verification vendors	Independent IVT & viewability	No	Yes — enable & set thresholds
Inventory exclusion/allow-lists	Known bad or unvetted supply	No	Yes — build & maintain
Viewability targeting	Hidden/stacked ads	No	Yes — set goals
Direct deals / PMPs	Open-exchange fraud risk	No	Yes — shift spend

Monitoring and Verifying Results

Prevention is only half the job — you also need to verify that filtering is working and continuously refine.

• Review invalid-traffic metrics in DV360 reporting to understand how much activity is being filtered and where.
• Reconcile with third-party verification to get an independent read on IVT, viewability and brand safety.
• Watch for anomalies: sudden spikes in impressions from unfamiliar domains, unusually high CTR with no conversions, or traffic concentrated in odd hours or geographies.
• Iterate on exclusions: feed findings back into allow-lists, exclusion lists and supply-source decisions.

A disciplined measurement loop turns fraud defence from a one-off setup into an ongoing advantage. If you're building out reporting rigour, our team can help structure it as part of DV360 managed services.

Where Human Expertise Adds Value

DV360's automated systems handle the heavy lifting, but fraudsters adapt constantly. The difference between adequate and excellent protection usually comes down to configuration discipline: how tightly you scope inventory, how carefully you maintain exclusions, and how rigorously you interpret verification data.

Common gaps we see include:

• Over-reliance on open exchange without verification layers.
• Exclusion lists that are set once and never updated.
• Ignoring supply-path transparency signals.
• Treating viewability and IVT as the same problem.

For teams without dedicated trafficking and media-quality resources, a managed or co-managed model closes these gaps. Explore our full range of DV360 services or see how a co-managed setup keeps your in-house team in control while adding specialist oversight.

Bringing It Together

DV360 gives advertisers one of the strongest fraud-prevention foundations in programmatic — automatic GIVT and SIVT filtering, respect for supply-chain standards, and deep verification integrations. But the platform rewards active management: prioritising transparent supply, tuning brand safety, enforcing viewability, and maintaining exclusion lists all measurably shrink your fraud surface.

Get those fundamentals right and you protect not just your budget, but the integrity of the data every optimisation decision depends on.

Ready to Tighten Your Fraud Defences?

If you want an expert review of your DV360 brand safety, verification and supply-path settings — or help building an ongoing media-quality process — get in touch with our team. We'll help you protect spend and keep your reporting clean.