Pixalate, the global market-leading ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform, today released the Q1 2024 Global SupplyChain Object (SCO) Verification Report for Open Programmatic Web Advertising. Pixalate also released Connected TV (CTV) and mobile app versions of the report.
The analysis contains insight from Pixalate’s OpenRTB SCO verification process, which examines open programmatic advertising SupplyChain Objects (SCO) across desktop and mobile web and also measures its implications for Invalid Traffic (IVT, including ad fraud). The report contains breakdowns by geographic region, including North America, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and Latin America (LATAM).
The SupplyChain Object enables buyers and intermediaries to view all parties selling or reselling open programmatic advertising inventory. Numerous partners are often involved in open programmatic supply paths, which causes fragmentation and makes the ecosystem vulnerable to ad fraud attacks. Pixalate’s latest reports benchmark the state and accuracy of SCO data, providing greater transparency in managing risks within the programmatic supply chain.
In the context of this report, Pixalate utilized the following verification failure reason codes:
- Unauthorized direct seller (77% of failures)
- Unauthorized reseller (5% of failures)
- No ads.txt file found (3% of failures)
- Unable to resolve sellers.json (6% of failures)
- Missing publisher node (10% of failures)
Key Findings
- Failed verification
- 14% of SCO marked as ‘complete’ failed Pixalate’s SCO verification
- Chains marked as complete that failed verification had a 42% higher IVT rate than chains that passed verification, according to Pixalate’s data
- 14% of SCO marked as ‘complete’ failed Pixalate’s SCO verification
- Unauthorized sellers
- 77% of web SCO traffic marked as ‘complete’ verification failures were attributed to unauthorized sellers
- Number of nodes and length of the supply chain
- 23% of web SCOs marked as ‘complete’ with 4 or more nodes failed Pixalate’s SCO verification
- 141% higher average IVT rate on web SCOs of 6 nodes or more compared to average IVT rate across all web SCOs
- 23% of web SCOs marked as ‘complete’ with 4 or more nodes failed Pixalate’s SCO verification
- Regional breakdown
- 9.1% of web SCO traffic marked ‘complete’ in North America failed verification
- 9.3% of web SCO traffic marked ‘complete’ in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) failed verification
- 8.6% of web SCO traffic marked ‘complete’ in Asia-Pacific (APAC) failed verification
- 19.7% of web SCO traffic marked ‘complete’ in Latin America (LATAM) failed verification
“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,” said Amit Shetty, Pixalate’s VP of Product. “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.”
Pixalate’s analysis includes a set of SCO verification checks as defined by Pixalate, utilizing IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt and sellers.json standards, along with SCO data from the OpenRTB bid stream to evaluate the accuracy of declared supply paths in the ad bid stream.
Pixalate’s data science team analyzed over 25 billion open programmatic ad impressions containing the OpenRTB SupplyChain Object (SCO) during Q1 2024 to compile this research. The data science team analyzed more than 270k CTV and mobile apps, and over 950k web domains.
Download the complete Q1 2024 SupplyChain Object (SCO) Verification Reports:
- Connected TV (CTV)
- Mobile Apps
- Web
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