In a recent Media Briefing, Digiday+ members had exclusive access to a market check on why some agency execs are noting an inflated rate of invalid impressions and click-through rates from Google despite DSPs telling a different story.

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Media Briefing: Some agency execs are mystified by heightened invalid traffic counts from Google compared to DSP reports

By Kayleigh Barber, media editor

During the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit last week, two agency executives voiced frustrations in the town hall discussions that Google was invalidating impressions and clicks from demand-side platforms to a greater extent than what the DSPs were reporting. But outside the walls of the town hall, those experiences around invalid traffic (IVT) don’t seem to be shared by other agency execs or publishers.

“Our ad servers are bringing back a good 20 [to] 30 [to] 40% of impressions, and even 90% of clicks, as invalid,” said an agency exec during the town hall who was granted anonymity under Chatham House rules. “We have a couple of… theories as to why. It’s usually around Google touching the media at some point to validate the different media that’s coming through, but in instances where it’s not touching it at some point, that’s really where we’re seeing the invalid go through.”

After the town hall, an attendee cited Adelphic as one DSP having this issue; Adelphic did not respond to a request for comment for this story. When asked if this was happening at other DSPs, a spokesperson from Nexxen said the company is unaware of this issue and The Trade Desk and Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Another agency exec in the room echoed this happening to them as well. This second agency exec said that it was primarily an issue regarding click-through rates (CTRs), however, and less around impressions. “We have these great CTRs in the DSPs, and then we get the [Google Campaign Manager] report and it’s a really bad click-through rate,” they said.