According to a Bizcommunity opinion piece by Marc Dhalluin, co-founder of ad-fraud audit firm TruthsetsOnline, South Africa’s digital advertising market, valued at roughly R35bn to R40bn a year, could be bleeding between R2.8bn and R12bn annually because of ad fraud.
Programmatic buying, which accounts for an estimated 40% to 50% of that market, is where most of the waste occurs. The author’s own analysis of local campaigns found programmatic wastage ranging from 20% to 60%. When those percentages are applied to the total market size, the resulting loss falls within the R2.8bn to R12bn range.
Independent data backs up the claim that South Africa is lagging behind the world. Fraudlogix’s 2026 analysis of 105.7 billion impressions recorded an invalid-traffic rate of 22.94%, compared with a global average of 20.64%.
In a live forensic audit of a global advertiser’s campaign, 41% of the impressions were confirmed fraudulent and 12% confirmed legitimate. The remaining impressions were left unclassified because they did not trigger the three-warning-sign threshold used by the auditor. After optimisation, the fraud rate in the most recent 20,000 impressions fell to 27%, showing that the leak can be identified and reduced.
Ad fraud is not just a technical glitch; it is a human problem driven by incentives. Agencies under pressure to spend client budgets often meet volume targets by accepting low-quality inventory. When fraudulent impressions are removed, the reported volume drops and revenue for the agency falls.
Mitigation tools can dramatically lower fraud rates. Integral Ad Science’s 2025 research showed that campaigns without mitigation suffered a 10.9% fraud rate, while those with mitigation recorded only 0.7% fraud.
Auditors are about to face new pressure. ISA 240 (Revised), the auditing standard on fraud in financial statements, applies to periods beginning on or after 15 December 2026. It sharpens the expectation that auditors will challenge management’s assumptions and weigh contradictory evidence. Because digital media is often a large discretionary line in a listed company’s accounts, audit committees will soon have to ask how companies verify that their ad impressions reached real people.
SMEs can take practical steps now. First, request detailed supply-chain reports from agencies and demand transparency on the tools used to filter bots. Second, consider third-party verification services that flag suspicious traffic. Third, incorporate fraud-mitigation clauses into agency contracts, tying payment to verified human impressions.
The author says reliable, industry-wide fraud figures do not exist, and that the range reflects what his firm regularly encounters in its work with large companies.
What this means for South African SMEs
Small businesses that allocate a modest portion of their budget to digital advertising should treat ad fraud as a cost of doing business that can be managed. By auditing their own media spend, using reputable verification tools, and demanding accountability from agencies, they can protect a larger share of their marketing dollars and improve the return on investment.
For more coverage of how digital trends affect small businesses, see our SME & Entrepreneurship section.
ITWeb counted more than 2,200 website-traffic services on Fiverr, with some promising thousands of visitors for as little as $5, illustrating how cheap the raw material for fraudulent impressions can be. The author lists tricks such as several ads stacked behind the visible one and ads served into spaces zero pixels wide, each billed as an impression. US Senator Mark Warner told the Federal Trade Commission that he had warned about bots in digital advertising a decade ago.
Adalytics’ 2024 research revealed that a widely used filtration product classified declared bots as valid human traffic 17% of the time and undeclared bots 77% of the time, according to the author. The vendors disputed the research, and that argument is still ongoing. Matt Sanders, formerly a senior PHD executive, argued in The Media Leader that fear has drained courage from agency life.
