Skip to content
Close
LOGIN
Take a tour
Get started
Take a tour
Get started
Featured
What Is Click Fraud Detection? How It Works, Methods & Tools in 2026
Featured blog image
Read now
Report

Invalid Traffic Impact Report: IT & Security

This report reveals how much of the sector's paid media budget is silently lost to bots, scrapers, and fraudulent clicks, based on an analysis of over 64 million ad clicks.

IT & Security advertisers face an average invalid traffic (IVT) rate of 4.29%, but individual campaigns ran as high as 77%, meaning the vast majority of those clicks had no chance of ever converting.

Download the full report for the complete platform, channel, and placement breakdown.

4.29% Avg. invalid traffic rate across IT & Security
$644k Estimated lost revenue per year
77% Highest recorded campaign-level IVT rate
64M+ Ad clicks analyzed across Q3 2025 - Q1 2026

What's covered?

  • Quarter-by-quarter IVT rates for all major platforms: Google, Microsoft Ads (Bing), LinkedIn, and Meta

  • A full Google channel breakdown across Search, Performance Max, Display, and Demand Gen, including which "clean" channel is rising fastest

  • The top worst-performing ad placements for IT & Security campaigns

  • Real customer results: IVT reductions and the CPA improvements that followed

  • Why ad platforms won't solve this problem for you
IT & Security Report Blog header

What is invalid traffic?

 

Invalid traffic (IVT) is any ad click or website visit that doesn't come from a real person with genuine buying interest. It includes bots (both benign and malicious), accidental clicks, automated scraping by competitors harvesting pricing and product data, and malicious clicks from rival advertisers.

Invalid traffic never converts, so every invalid click wastes budget directly — and worse, it feeds corrupted data back into ad platform bidding algorithms, pulling your campaigns further away from genuine buyers over time.

Why IT & Security is uniquely exposed

The irony is striking: the companies building the world's defenses against automated threats are themselves being targeted by them through their paid media.

IT & Security advertisers compete on high-CPC, high-intent keywords like "endpoint protection" and "network security solution," which attract bad actors scraping competitor pricing and positioning rather than buying.

Long B2B buyer journeys, free trials, and gated demos add more surface area for bots to exploit — flooding CRMs with junk leads that look identical to real ones.

 FAQs

What is the average invalid traffic rate for IT & Security advertisers?

Across more than 64 million analysed ad clicks, the average invalid traffic rate for IT & Security advertisers was 4.29%.

The figure varies significantly by platform, channel, and quarter, and individual campaigns recorded rates as high as 77%.
How much does invalid traffic cost IT & Security companies?

For an IT & Security business spending $5 million per year on paid advertising at an average $8 CPC, a 4.29% IVT rate translates to over $214,000 in directly wasted ad spend each year.

Factoring in a conservative 3:1 return on ad spend, the lost revenue opportunity approaches $644,000 annually.
Why are IT & Security companies targeted by invalid traffic?

IT & Security advertisers compete on expensive, high-intent keywords, which attract bad actors scraping competitor pricing, ad copy, and product positioning — activity that registers as a real click but carries zero buying intent.

Long B2B buyer journeys, freemium trials, and gated content also create more opportunities for bots to exploit sign-up flows and contaminate CRMs with fake leads.
Which ad platform has the most invalid traffic in B2B?

In this analysis, LinkedIn recorded the highest average invalid traffic rate of any channel at 15.34%, and the rate rose consistently every quarter.

Microsoft Ads (Bing) was the next highest, while Google had the lowest average rate of the four platforms studied.
Can ad platforms stop invalid traffic on their own?

Only partially. Ad platforms catch the obvious cases — duplicate clicks, declared bots, and basic behavioural patterns — but sophisticated invalid traffic that mimics real human behaviour routinely slips through.

Comprehensive real-time analysis is computationally expensive for platforms to run at scale, and platform documentation often shifts traffic-quality responsibility onto the advertiser.
What's inside the IT & Security Invalid Traffic Report? The report contains the full quarter-by-quarter IVT breakdown across Google, Bing, LinkedIn, and Meta; a detailed Google channel analysis; the 25 worst-performing ad placements in the sector; the methodology behind the figures; and real customer results showing how removing invalid traffic improved CPA. It's completely free to download.

Leading performance marketers use Lunio