Traffic that is not a real person with real intent. Bots, scrapers, data center traffic, and developer testing scripts that nobody turned off. General IVT is mostly accidental. Sophisticated IVT is deliberate fraud. Both inflate your impression counts and dilute your results. The distinction matters because SIVT requires active detection, not just filtering. If your verification vendor is not calling out SIVT separately, ask why.
Ad tech glossary
Invalid Traffic (IVT)
Technical definition
Any activity that doesn't come from a legitimate user with genuine interest in the content, including both fraudulent and accidental non-human traffic.
The ADLINGO translation
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