Insights Archives - Integral Ad Science

IAS and Snap Expand Long-Standing Partnership to Include Sponsored Snaps

IAS Team — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:30:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that we have expanded our partnership with Snap Inc., giving advertisers even more powerful tools to validate and optimize their Snapchat campaigns.

With the addition of Viewability and Invalid Traffic (IVT) measurement for Sponsored Snaps in the Chat Feed, IAS now provides comprehensive coverage across all Snapchat ad formats on any device.

More Transparency for Sponsored Snaps

Everyday 69 million people use Snapchat to create, share, and enjoy visual content. Sponsored Snaps allows advertisers to send Snaps directly to an audience and appear in Snapchat’s most popular tab: the Chat Feed.

Now, advertisers can measure how those Sponsored Snaps perform with the same transparency available across other Snapchat ad formats. The addition of IAS measurement ensures brands can better understand ad quality, engagement, and the integrity of impressions in this high-traffic environment.

IAS’s Total Media Quality for Snap provides advertisers with:

Comprehensive Measurement: Access Viewability, Invalid Traffic, Brand Safety and Suitability Measurement for available placements within IAS Signal
Brand Protection: Validate that media is appearing next to content aligned to brand goals and access fully customizable reports to help you understand the comprehensive brand suitability performance for a given campaign
Transparency: Gain insights into how ads are engaging audiences and reaching real users with metrics such as Time-in-View, Invalid Traffic rates, and more
Measure Every Second: Only IAS uses industry-leading frame-by-frame Multimedia Classification technology to classify content — combining image, audio, and text signals
Global reach: Engage in all Snapchat supported languages across Sponsored Snaps, Single Image or Video Ads, Story Ads, Collection Ads, Commercials, AR Lenses, and AR Filters

A Long-Standing Commitment to Media Quality

The expanded partnership builds on seven years of collaboration between IAS and Snap. Since 2018, IAS has provided advertisers with Viewability and IVT measurement on Snapchat, later adding Brand Safety and Suitability capabilities in 2024. Earlier this year, IAS also announced a first-to-market attention measurement partnership with Snap and Lumen Research — continuing to push innovation in how advertisers understand and optimize campaign performance.

Reach out to an IAS representative to learn more.

The post IAS and Snap Expand Long-Standing Partnership to Include Sponsored Snaps appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Inside “Arcade,” the Gaming Web That Plays Itself

IAS Team — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Executive Summary

The IAS Threat Lab is a dedicated team within Integral Ad Science (IAS) focused on uncovering, dissecting, and mitigating sophisticated ad-fraud schemes and malicious digital-advertising behavior. The team’s latest discovery, Arcade, reveals a growing monetization pattern within the open web’s gaming ecosystem. A large cluster of HTML5 gaming domains, all active and fully functional, are monetizing their ad supply through hidden in-app browser activity sourced from fraudulent Android applications. These gaming domains receive real ad requests and deliver playable content, but the traffic itself never comes from visible users. Instead, it originates from background-rendered browser tabs embedded inside Android utilities and lightweight gaming apps.

The IAS Threat Lab identified 50 Android apps with a combined 10 million installs, collectively driving traffic to a network of more than 200 HTML5 gaming domains. The HTML5 games are legitimate and responsive, yet typically unseen by human users. IAS’s fraud detection systems identified unusual background rendering and domain iteration behavior, enabling early intervention before the campaign reached full scale.

An Invisible Arcade of Real Games

The domains at the heart of this scheme are deceptively authentic. Each hosts playable, browser-based games, complete with interactive interfaces and advertising frameworks. The domain names frequently contain gaming-related keywords such as “game” or “play” and appear innocuous to verification systems because the pages load correctly and function as intended. When traffic is reviewed on the surface, everything points to legitimate gaming engagement.

However, behind this facade, fraudulent Android apps continuously load these pages in invisible in-app browser tabs, generating a constant stream of ad impressions. The pages are not user-facing, and the activity occurs silently while the app performs unrelated tasks. One analyzed app cycled through hundreds of domains in sequence, creating persistent, automated inventory that appeared indistinguishable from genuine gameplay sessions.

How the Scheme Activates

Arcade’s activation framework builds on the same cloaking principles first disclosed by IAS in Mirage. In that earlier operation, apps concealed their ad fraud logic until certain install conditions were met, allowing them to appear legitimate in standard testing environments. Arcade applies this same approach.

When installed directly from app stores, Arcade-linked apps behave normally and show no signs of suspicious behavior. The ad fraud components only activate when the app identifies that it has been installed through a paid ad campaign or referral flow.

This determination is made using attribution SDKs (Appsflyer SDK), which reports the method of installation to the app. If the install is confirmed to be campaign-driven, the app communicates with a remote command-and-control server, transmitting device and referral data in custom headers. When these headers meet strict validation checks, the server responds with an encrypted payload, which the app decrypts and loads dynamically. The decrypted code enables hidden in-app browser tabs to render HTML5 gaming domains in the background and, in many cases, activates out-of-context ad delivery as a secondary monetization path

Because this payload is delivered only to targeted devices, the apps remain clean under normal review conditions. Many samples also include anti-analysis safeguards designed to detect virtualized or sandboxed environments and suspend execution, further complicating detection efforts.

Monetization at Two Levels

Once activated, apps under the Arcade cluster monetize through two distinct yet complementary mechanisms. The first is hidden traffic generation, which uses the network of gaming domains as a monetization endpoint. These domains serve as the true beneficiaries, selling inventory created by invisible sessions within the apps. The second is out-of-context advertising, a recurring behavior seen in earlier IAS investigations such as Vapor and Mirage, where apps run unexpected full-screen or interstitial ads appearing outside normal engagement flows.

This dual structure allows threat actors to extract revenue from both visible and invisible ad surfaces. While the visible ads frustrate users, the invisible gaming sessions serve as the far greater financial engine.

Distribution and Geographic Shifts

Arcade’s early activity was concentrated in Western markets, primarily the United States, Brazil, and Canada. Over time, the campaigns have migrated toward Asia-Pacific regions. By September 2025, installs and traffic were dominated by Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. These countries now comprise nearly half of all detected Arcade traffic, indicating a deliberate redirection of campaign targeting.

Among the identified apps, Street King Vacano (com.txt.streetking.vacano) a lightweight gaming app exemplifies Arcade’s scaling model. The app achieved top chart positions, including #1 Top New Free, in several markets and reached over 1 million installs in less than one month.

Detection and Outlook

Arcade is anything but subtle. The volume of traffic attributed to this operation points to a well-resourced and coordinated effort, capable of producing and maintaining a myriad of Android apps and gaming domains at industrial scale. The threat actors behind Arcade have invested heavily in development infrastructure, domain acquisition, and continuous app deployment, allowing them to sustain large amounts of fraudulent traffic that blend into the broader gaming ecosystem.

IAS fraud detection systems identified the operation through a combination of behavioral anomaly analysis and domain traversal pattern recognition. Repeated, rapid page loads and non-interactive rendering events exposed the activity as non-human.

The ongoing investigation continues to map the infrastructure of developer accounts and associated domain operators behind the scheme. While the current set includes 200 gaming domains and 50 apps, the modular nature of Arcade’s framework suggests that new domains can easily be added as others are blocked.

Conclusion

Arcade demonstrates how legitimate web content can be reappropriated into a hidden monetization layer. The gaming domains themselves are central to this operation, earning revenue from traffic that no human ever generates. Android apps function as the traffic engine, quietly delivering ad requests that fund the ecosystem behind them.

By detecting and removing these apps and domains from the advertising supply chain, IAS effectively cuts off the operation’s financial lifeline, preventing further monetization and neutralizing the resources that fuel its continued growth.

IAS Threat Lab remains committed to uncovering and disrupting evolving monetization schemes before they reach advertisers’ budgets. Learn more about our AI-powered approach to combatting fraud pre- and post-bid.

The post Inside “Arcade,” the Gaming Web That Plays Itself appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Driving Media Efficiency for Mid-Market Advertisers with StackAdapt

IAS Team — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Launch programmatic campaigns with greater confidence and accuracy in StackAdapt

At IAS, we’re committed to providing programmatic advertisers everywhere with greater transparency, trust, and control over their campaigns. That’s why we’re integrating our pre-bid segments within the StackAdapt DSP.

Advertisers can gain access to IAS pre-bid segments for Viewability, Invalid Traffic, Brand Safety, Context Control Avoidance and Targeting, and Quality Sync that empower them to minimize the risk of their campaigns running alongside harmful content, while preserving scale.

IAS’s pre-bid segments for avoidance and targeting optimization provide advertisers with:

Precision Targeting at Scale: IAS’s advanced predictive science analyzes the true context, sentiment, and semantics of web pages, enabling programmatic buyers to maximize their campaign impact and increase ROI.
Increased Efficiency: IAS’s Quality Sync eases campaign management for advertisers – streamlining workflow, reducing block rates, and improving overall media quality across campaigns.
Simplified Workflow: IAS pre-bid segments can be activated immediately to ensure advertisers can achieve optimal media quality results and hit campaign KPIs without having to worry about mid-flight optimization.
Custom, Dynamic Control: Advertisers can avoid unsuitable content based on brand-specific needs across desktop, mobile web, and in-app, in more than 50 languages.

Closing the gap between performance and brand equity

IAS’s predictive and real-time data allows advertisers to maintain transparency and quality control for display and video ads across desktop, mobile web, and in-app environments. In addition to IAS’s pre-bid segments, advertisers can pair IAS post-bid blocking and verification to refine strategy and enforcement, to create a comprehensive media quality and performance strategy.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your programmatic campaigns?

Talk to an IAS representative to find out how.

The post Driving Media Efficiency for Mid-Market Advertisers with StackAdapt appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

IAS and Good-Loop Team Up to Enhance and Expand Emissions Measurement for Advertisers

IAS Team — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

At IAS, we’ve always believed that media quality means more than making sure ads are viewable, fraud-free, and brand-safe. It’s also about accountability — and that includes environmental responsibility and transparency. That’s why we’re excited to announce our expanded partnership with Good-Loop, making advanced carbon emissions measurement available to all IAS customers globally at no extra cost.

Why This Matters

As carbon emissions legislation rolling out across the globe and brands setting new sustainability goals, understanding the environmental impact of digital advertising has never been more important. Measuring carbon emissions is quickly becoming a core part of media quality — right alongside viewability, fraud prevention, brand safety and suitability, and geographic accuracy.

Now, every impression IAS measures across the open internet will include data on its carbon footprint, helping to make this standard practice for all advertisers and giving them the transparency they need to take meaningful action.

Powered by Good-Loop

Good-Loop, a certified B Corporation on a mission to deliver positive, climate-friendly advertising, has been powering emissions measurement within IAS Signal since 2023. Together, we’ve collaborated with early-adopter advertisers to create emissions benchmarks while also supporting the Advertising Association and Ad Net Zero in the development of a universal industry standard.

Our Commitment

Both IAS and Good-Loop are committed to leading by example. IAS has voluntarily published data with The Climate Registry and is now officially setting SBTi-verified Net Zero emissions targets, joining over 10,000 companies, including Good-Loop, on the publicly verified path to Net Zero.

When it comes to protecting our planet, actions matter. By integrating sustainability into media quality, we’re helping advertisers reduce their carbon footprint — one campaign at a time.

For more information on IAS’s sustainability initiatives, please visit our ESG page.

The post IAS and Good-Loop Team Up to Enhance and Expand Emissions Measurement for Advertisers appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

IAS Threat Lab Uncovers Sophisticated Fraud Scheme Targeting Android Devices

IAS Team — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

What happens when utility apps turn into full-screen ad machines? The IAS Threat Lab has uncovered a global ad fraud scheme — codenamed “Mirage” — designed to mislead users, inflate installs, and exploit the mobile advertising ecosystem.

The Scheme

The IAS Threat Lab has uncovered a large-scale, fast-evolving ad fraud operation known as Mirage — a sprawling network of fraudulent Android apps designed to hijack user devices and exploit ad ecosystems at massive scale.

Mirage apps masquerade as helpful utilities like phone cleaners and battery boosters. On the surface, they appear harmless. But behind the scenes, they use cloaking techniques and bot-driven installs to quietly switch on aggressive ad fraud behavior once installed through specific referral links. The result: full-screen interstitial ads that interrupt users out of context, with no real utility provided by the apps themselves.

Threat Lab researchers have identified over 300 Mirage-linked app IDs, collectively amassing more than 70 million downloads and generating over 350 million daily bid requests. These apps were built with one goal in mind: monetize unsuspecting users through persistent, non-consensual advertising.

Mirage marks a troubling evolution of tactics first seen in the Threat Lab-discovered Vapor scheme. Unlike Vapor apps, which gradually stripped away features over time, Mirage apps are designed to mislead from the outset — launching with fake installs to climb app store rankings and turning on monetization only when real users start downloading.

The Takedown

IAS collaborated directly with Google to take swift action against the Mirage operation. Based on Threat Lab intelligence, all identified Mirage apps have been removed from the Google Play Store. Google Play Protect is actively alerting users and will disable these apps automatically — even when installed outside of the Play Store ecosystem.

IAS continues to monitor Mirage’s activity, as its operators rapidly adapt through reskinned apps, recycled developer accounts, and global distribution across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

Want to understand Mirage’s full scale and how IAS unraveled the scheme? The full report includes:

A breakdown of Mirage’s app behavior and install patterns
Tactics used to cloak fraud from store reviewers
Case study of a Mirage app that reached #1 in the U.S.
Timeline of IAS and Google’s coordinated takedown

The post IAS Threat Lab Uncovers Sophisticated Fraud Scheme Targeting Android Devices appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Combating AI-Generated Slop Sites

IAS Team — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Pros and Cons of Generative AI for Programmatic Advertisers

Generative AI offers a multitude of benefits to programmatic advertisers across creative development and personalization, campaign optimization, brand safety and fraud mitigation, and operational efficiency.

While powerful, generative AI also introduces a new challenge to programmatic advertisers: the proliferation of low quality and ad spammy slop sites.

The Scope of AI-Generated Content

The amount of AI-generated content is only growing. EMarketer forecasts that as much as 90% of web content may be AI-generated by 2026, and some AI-driven sites are producing up to 1,200 articles daily, aiming to maximize ad revenue through sheer volume.

According to Jounce Media’s The State Of The Open Internet 2025, DSP demand follows supply, even supply that marketers are actively attempting to avoid. DSPs treat supply as a commodity and have a bias toward buying recently published supply versus quality supply.

This creates an incentive for publishers to flood the market with the maximum volume of supply at the minimum possible cost — utilizing AI to produce the content at the below rates:

41% of available web supply was published this week.
26% of available web supply was published today.
6% is content that was published this hour.

AI-Generated Slop Sites are Ad Clutter

At IAS, we classify these low quality slop sites as “ad clutter.” To identify ad clutter sites, our machine learning model evaluates the following site characteristics:

High ad-to-content ratio
Large total number of ads (high ad density)
Presence of auto-refresh ads
High refresh rate
Presence of autoplay video ads
Templated design
Plagiarized or AI-generated content

If ad clutter sites are also conducting ad arbitrage — buying cheap traffic and then aggressively monetizing the resulting page views — then our model will flag these sites as Made-For-Advertising (MFA).

Implications for Advertisers and Publishers

Advertisers are wasting ad spend on low quality slop sites that do not drive campaign performance. An IAS analysis from over 40 global agencies and brands found traffic served on quality sites have a 91% higher conversion rate than traffic served on ad clutter sites. Further analysis by IAS found that quality sites were more cost efficient than ad clutter sites, delivering lower cost-per-conversion by 25%.

There are also brand safety concerns for advertisers. Associating with spammy or misleading content can harm brand reputation and consumer trust. According to IAS’s State of Brand Safety report, 57% of consumers consider spammy sites inappropriate content, and another 70% say they trust brands less when advertising near inappropriate content.

For publishers, MFA and AI-generated slop sites are siphoning ad spend away from their quality sites. According to the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency study, it’s estimated that advertisers are wasting $10 billion in spend each year on MFA sites. This spend should be redirected to higher performing quality sites.

How IAS is Helping Advertisers and Publishers

Advertisers can avoid wasting their ad spend on AI-generated slop sites that do not perform and redirect this spend to quality publishers. IAS offers ad clutter and MFA pre-bid avoidance segments within all the leading DSPs. These segments are available to Quality Sync and Context Control Avoidance clients at no additional cost. Contact an IAS representative to learn more.

For an overview on how generative AI is impacting ad fraud, please read Fraud in Generative AI: A deep dive into how Gen AI affects marketers.

The post Combating AI-Generated Slop Sites appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Confidence in Every Impression: How IAS Helps Marketers Navigate Major Commerce Events

IAS Team — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000

By Jen Schwam

Retail marketers are no strangers to seasonal pressure. But when preparing for upcoming tentpole commerce events, it’s crucial to run efficient campaigns that drive outcomes.

Due to high demand and heavy traffic, major retail events compress everything: timelines, attention spans, and margin for error. Brands are often expected to deliver stronger results faster, cheaper, and without compromise, and marketers need precision and tools that turn every impression into a measurable opportunity — not a question mark.

This is where IAS becomes a partner in performance, helping brands navigate challenges that come with major commerce events with clarity, control, and measurable outcomes. By delivering real-time measurement, IAS empowers marketers to optimize in-flight, rather than retroactively analyzing missed performance. That means bids can be adjusted, budgets reallocated, and underperforming channels course-corrected while campaigns are still live.

Achieving offsite programmatic success during major commerce events

During tentpole commerce events, it’s tempting to focus entirely on lower-funnel tactics like retargeting and last-click conversions. But top-performing marketers know that sustainable performance doesn’t come from chasing clicks — it comes from building connections.

The most effective retail strategies bridge the gap between brand-building and conversion. When upper-funnel campaigns are aligned with performance investments, marketers can drive product discovery, attract new-to-brand customers, and set the stage for repeat purchases — all while hitting their immediate goals.

IAS helps brands strike that balance. Our programmatic solutions deliver results at scale — without compromising control, quality, or transparency.

Here’s how:

1. Smarter pre-bid targeting

Ensure ads appear in high-quality, relevant environments using tools like:

Context Control to target trusted content adjacencies
Custom contextual segments tailored to your campaign themes
Ad fraud prevention that blocks invalid traffic before the bid
Made-For-Advertising (MFA) pre-bid avoidance to increase ROI

2. Transparent post-bid measurement

Understand what’s actually working with:

Viewability and attention metrics to gauge engagement
Brand safety and suitability verification to confirm your ads are served in safe environments
Fraud detection and reporting to continuously improve performance
MFA and Ad Clutter detection to reduce media waste

3. Privacy-safe audience expansion

Combine contextual intelligence with audience signals to reach high-value users — without third-party cookies. It’s ideal for capturing new-to-brand shoppers during peak sales periods.

In short, IAS equips marketers with full-funnel tools that connect the dots between exposure and outcomes. Because at peak retail moments, it’s not just about buying more media — it’s about making the right media work harder.

Staying protected when fraud spikes

When traffic spikes during high-volume retail events, so does the risk of fraud. Surges in demand attract not only real shoppers, but also bad actors looking to exploit the moment through bots, invalid impressions, and spoofed inventory. And without the right safeguards in place, a significant share of media spend can quietly slip through the cracks.

Marketers can’t afford that kind of waste. Not when every impression is more expensive, and every dollar is under scrutiny.

According to the 20th edition of IAS’s Media Quality Report, fraud rates in non-optimized campaigns reached a four-year high of 10.9% by the end of 2024. IAS-protected campaigns maintained a fraud rate of just 0.7%, which is a staggering 15x difference. That gap isn’t just eye-opening — it’s budget-saving. When every CPM is inflated by seasonal demand, eliminating even a fraction of invalid impressions has an outsized impact on return.

IAS’s fraud protection tools are engineered to go beyond detection. They’re built to stop threats before they drain your budget.

During tentpole commerce events, when attention is fragmented, competition is fierce, and conversion windows are narrow, these capabilities help brands turn every impression into better outcomes.

Expanding beyond your digital storefront

Offsite media is becoming a key part of the retail performance mix. Channels like CTV, programmatic display, and affiliate placements give marketers more ways to reach high-intent shoppers in the moments that matter.

But with that opportunity comes greater complexity — especially during tentpole commerce events.

Offsite environments are less controlled than traditional retail media. They’re more fragmented, harder to monitor, and often carry higher risk. Brand safety, viewability, and performance can vary significantly across placements. And with budgets under pressure, marketers need visibility into exactly where their ads are running — and if those impressions are delivering real value.

IAS tools are designed to bring structure and control to offsite campaigns. Wherever you’re activating your campaigns, IAS gives you the confidence to scale with clear safeguards in place.

Proof that performance pays off

In today’s market, marketers aren’t just asked to optimize — they’re expected to justify every decision. Media investments come under scrutiny, outcomes are tracked more closely than ever, and the expectation isn’t simply performance — it’s proof.

IAS helps brands meet that demand with tangible, measurable results that go beyond surface-level metrics. Across digital campaigns, partnering with IAS has helped marketers:

Increase conversion rates by 183% by leveraging pre-bid optimization
Reduce invalid traffic by up to 88%, preserving budget and eliminating waste using pre-bid optimization
Lower cost-per-click by 73% using Context Control for targeting*

The real power of IAS lies in what those results unlock. When your team isn’t chasing down ad fraud or questioning brand suitability, you gain time, clarity, and confidence. You can scale what’s working, cut what isn’t, and know exactly why you’re making those moves.

Performance isn’t just a number on a dashboard. It’s a foundation for better decisions, stronger campaigns, and sustainable growth.

Turn every impression into better outcomes

Tentpole commerce events offer massive opportunity, but they also come with pressure. IAS makes it easier than ever to make your brand stand out during these high-traffic retail moments. With a full suite of measurement and optimization solutions, IAS empowers brands to:

Reach the right audiences in the right environments
Maximize ROI by eliminating fraud and low-quality inventory
Turn media transparency into a strategic advantage across offsite and social channels

Make every impression do more for your business. Whether you’re planning for the next big commerce surge or looking to stabilize ad spend during uncertain times, IAS brings the tools, insights, and protection to move forward with confidence.

Want to see how it works for your campaigns?

Talk to an IAS representative to get started today.

The post Confidence in Every Impression: How IAS Helps Marketers Navigate Major Commerce Events appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Unlock Deeper Attention Insights on Snapchat

IAS Team — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Go beyond viewability for a holistic look at media performance on Snapchat

At IAS, we’re committed to evolving the way you measure and understand your media performance. That’s why we’re pleased to announce first-to-market Snap Attention Measurement* — a new product in partnership with Snap and Lumen Research to bring advanced attention insights to your campaigns.

This new offering combines IAS’s AI-powered media quality data with Lumen’s eye-tracking model, creating a bespoke attention score for a holistic view of how audiences are engaging with your ads.

With Snap Attention Measurement, you get:

A custom attention metric on Snapchat: Go beyond viewability and leverage key attention insights within IAS Signal to understand media performance and engagement.
A holistic view of attention across channels: Seamlessly view Snap Attention and IAS Quality Attention Measurement across platforms and channels.
Trusted Third-Party Measurement: Providing you with trusted, independent third-party attention measurement to support your campaign performance goals.

Access a holistic understanding of attention to drive media performance on Snapchat. Reach out to an IAS representative to learn more.

*Snap Attention Measurement will be available in Q3 2025.

The post Unlock Deeper Attention Insights on Snapchat appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Elevating Transparency and Performance with IAS’s Impression Feed

IAS Team — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

As digital advertising grows more complex, the industry’s call for transparency has never been louder. Advertisers, platforms, and partners alike are demanding clearer insights into where their ads run, how they perform, and what’s driving results. But for too long, much of that clarity has been locked inside the programmatic black box.

Enter Impression Feed — addressing the industry’s need for transparency.

Known more broadly as log-level data (LLD) or impression-level data, this level of granularity has become a critical component for media buyers and platforms looking to take ownership of their performance. As ad platforms begin to open up access to this data, advertisers and agencies are eager to put it to work — whether to build in-house optimization tools, power custom bidding models, or unify reporting across platforms.

The challenge? Raw data is only as useful as it is accessible and actionable. That’s where IAS steps in.

Understanding Impression Feed

Transparency, customization, and precision are no longer optional — they’re essential for digital media performance. IAS’s Impression Feed meets these demands head-on by giving advertisers and partners direct access to the most granular level of media quality data available.

What is Impression Feed?

Formerly known as Log-Level Data (LLD), Impression Feed is a powerful data solution that provides 250+ metrics at the individual impression level. Each row of data represents a single impression IAS has measured — allowing advertisers to capture detailed insights for every ad served, across supported formats and environments.

Impression Feed delivers highly granular, impression-by-impression quality metrics across fraud, viewability, brand safety and suitability, geo, as well as other advanced metrics and advanced outcome metrics — offering a clear, customizable dataset designed for both verification and performance – collected and normalized across partners.

Impression Feed is designed to meet the needs of today’s most data-driven organizations — from advertisers and agencies to platforms and managed service providers. This high-resolution view enables customers to:

Build bespoke planning, reporting, and optimization tools
Join impression data with campaign, audience, or creative signals
Analyze what’s working — at scale and in detail

Impression Feed puts the raw performance data directly in your hands, giving you the freedom to define success on your terms. With two flexible offerings — Standard and Premium — advertisers can select the level of detail that best suits their business needs and optimization goals.

Who benefits from Impression Feed?

Advertisers use Impression Feed to power in-house optimization tools and gain clearer visibility into where and how their media dollars perform. With high-quality data delivered hourly, teams can benchmark success, monitor campaign health, and reallocate spend with confidence.

Agencies often rely on Impression Feed to streamline media planning and reporting. With access to aggregated, structured data, they can feed proprietary algorithms and provide their advertiser clients with richer, insight-driven recommendations.

Publishers use Impression Feed to unlock powerful opportunities to optimize inventory, improve yield, and strengthen advertiser trust. By leveraging granular impression-level data, publishers can refine page layouts, package high-quality inventory into premium deals, and proactively address campaign performance issues — all with the transparency and credibility of IAS verification.

Platform partners including DSPs and SSPs can use Impression Feed to improve algorithmic buying and inventory curation:

DSPs tend to leverage the data to feed custom algorithms, like quality CPM (qCPM) optimization to drive greater performance.
SSPs can use Impression Feed to enhance their services and deliver more curated, high-performance inventory packages.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) integrate IAS data with audience insights to build privacy-safe targeting strategies. By layering keyword signals and contextual intelligence, they deliver more tailored and effective client campaigns.

What data is available in Impression Feed?

Impression Feed includes a comprehensive mix of metrics that span brand safety and suitability, fraud, geo, viewability, and more. Advertisers can choose from a pre-defined set of fields — or work with IAS to build a tailored data schema that aligns with their existing systems and KPIs.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in each tier.

Standard Impression Feed: Foundational insights for smarter media strategies

For many teams, media success starts with clarity. The Standard Impression Feed delivers streamlined access to the key metrics needed for day-to-day decision-making and lightweight analytics. This tier is built for advertisers and agencies looking to verify performance, plan future campaigns, and benchmark results using high-quality impression-level data.

The dataset includes 27 core metrics across five categories:

Metadata: Ad campaign details, media type, and platform type
Fraud: Detection of invalid traffic types
Brand Safety and Suitability: Pass/fail results based on IAS standard category settings
Geo: Country, state, and DMA-level reporting
Viewability: Yes/No viewable flags, plus video quartile completions

Use cases for Standard Impression Feed include:

Benchmarking success: Compare campaign performance to peer and industry benchmarks.
Quick validation: Run rapid checks to confirm setup accuracy and delivery integrity.
Strategic planning: Conduct post-campaign analysis to inform next-year media decisions.
Basic performance analytics: Leverage simple metrics like viewability to guide optimizations.

This tier is ideal for advertisers and agencies who need accessible, high-quality data for better control and seamless integration of reporting data into their dashboards/reporting systems.

Go beyond reporting with Premium-level precision

For performance-driven teams, the Premium Impression Feed offers more than transparency — it delivers the infrastructure to build smarter, faster, and more impactful campaigns. With access to enriched impression-level data and customizable metrics, advertisers and partners can go far beyond standard reporting to power in-house models, train AI algorithms, and inform every decision with precision.

Premium includes all Standard fields, plus advanced metrics that enable richer insights, advanced modeling, and deeper optimization:

Advanced Metadata: Browser/device details
Advanced Fraud: Granular fraud subcategories for detailed risk classification
Advanced Brand Suitability: Scores across nuanced content categories like hate speech and violence
Advanced Geo: Language signals, time zone, and enhanced location attributes
Advanced Viewability: Time-in-view, hover rate, scroll depth, and custom visibility calculations

Together, these fields support a wide range of applications — from audience modeling and AI training to real-time performance tuning.

Here’s how advanced teams are using Premium to unlock performance:

Joinability and enrichment

Premium Impression Feed integrates seamlessly with both first- and third-party datasets. Using joinable identifiers — such as impression ID, DSP Creative ID, URL, Audience ID, or others — advertisers can uncover a more detailed picture of where, how, and why campaigns perform. This opens the door for richer attribution, deeper audience understanding, and full-funnel campaign insights.

Whether it’s analyzing how a specific creative performs across multiple channels or attributing outcomes to individual publishers, joinability enables a more unified, connected data strategy.

Custom metrics control

One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to media measurement. Premium users have the flexibility to define metrics that match their unique business needs, such as custom viewability definitions, refined brand suitability thresholds, or vertical-specific KPIs.

This flexibility helps internal teams align measurement with campaign goals, reduce noise, and focus on what actually drives success.

High-value signals for smarter decisioning

Premium Impression Feed includes IAS’s most sophisticated quality and outcome-based signals. These advanced metrics are designed to help advertisers move from reactive optimization to predictive planning.

Attention measurement captures how audiences engage with ads, providing insight into potential impact.
qCPM reveals the true cost of effective media, factoring in quality and context rather than just price.
Carbon emissions data enables advertisers to track and reduce the environmental impact of their campaigns while maintaining performance goals.

These signals help advertisers go beyond clicks and impressions to optimize for meaningful outcomes.

Always-on enhancements

As part of IAS’s continued investment in data innovation, Premium Impression Feed users gain early access to cutting-edge metrics as they are developed. From contextual intelligence to attention signals and beyond, Premium users are always equipped with the latest tools to stay ahead of the curve.

Built for custom optimization

One of the most powerful features of Impression Feed — specifically with the Premium tier — is its flexibility. Advertisers can build fully customized, in-house solutions by merging IAS signals with their own campaign, audience, or performance data.

Custom tools can be built using impression-level identifiers such as:

IAS unique impression ID
Ad server or DSP macro values (e.g., custom session IDs, DSP creative IDs)
Device-level signals

Looking ahead, IAS will continue to enrich the dataset through 2025 with planned additions including audience and outcomes signals based on advertiser needs. This ensures that teams using Impression Feed today will be well-positioned for the data demands of tomorrow.

Increasing accessibility to Impression Feed

IAS’s Impression Feed is a critical tool for enhancing transparency, precision, and performance — but accessibility is key to taking action on these metrics. That’s why we’ve partnered with Databricks to join their open-source protocol, which enables secure data sharing across platforms without requiring data duplication or movement.

Through this integration, advertisers have the option to access Impression Feed data directly via Databricks without needing to manually ingest raw log files, reducing operational friction and increasing speed and accessibility to insights.

Explore what’s possible with Impression Feed

Impression Feed is more than a reporting tool. It’s a foundation for transparency, trust, and transformation in digital advertising. In a world where data-driven strategy is the baseline, Impression Feed empowers advertisers to go further — fueling smarter decisions, stronger outcomes, and full visibility into every impression that matters.

Whether you’re starting with the Standard offering or building with Premium, our teams are ready to support your goals with a solution tailored to your data needs.

Contact your IAS representative today to learn more about Impression Feed.

The post Elevating Transparency and Performance with IAS’s Impression Feed appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

How IAS is Fighting Back Against the Shape-Shifting Kaleidoscope Scheme

IAS Team — Fri, 09 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Ad fraud is evolving — and so are we.

The IAS Threat Lab has uncovered a sophisticated new threat dubbed Kaleidoscope — a deceptive Android ad fraud operation that’s as dynamic as it is dangerous. This scheme hides behind seemingly legitimate apps available on Google Play, while malicious lookalike versions are quietly distributed through third-party app stores.

What makes Kaleidoscope so dangerous?

Like its namesake, Kaleidoscope is constantly shifting, transforming its structure to evade detection and prolong its fraudulent activity. The scheme’s complexity lies in:

App cloning with a twist: Two versions of the same app — one clean, one malicious — sharing a single app ID. The clean version gets distributed via official app stores, while the malicious twin hides in third-party app stores, flooding the ecosystem with fake impressions.
Rebranded SDKs: Following exposure of the CaramelAds SDK in earlier schemes like Konfety, fraudsters have pivoted — stripping out identifiers and repackaging malicious code in new, harder-to-detect SDKs.
Concealed infrastructure: A web of new domains powers communication between infected devices and command-and-control servers, allowing bad actors to coordinate large-scale fraud in real time.
Continued expansion: IAS has uncovered over 130 app IDs, including 40 newly uncovered apps, associated with Kaleidoscope, driving an estimated 2.5 million fraudulent installs per month.

A new chapter in mobile ad fraud

Kaleidoscope is not an isolated incident — it’s a blueprint for how bad actors are adapting in the wake of increased security measures. IAS’s Threat Lab has conducted deep forensic analysis of both previously known and newly uncovered apps to trace the evolution of this fraud model.

It’s a dangerous shift from simple out-of-context ad abuse to something far more dynamic — and scalable.

IAS is staying ahead of the fraud

IAS customers are already protected. Our fraud pre-bid avoidance solution, available within leading DSPs, leverages real-time machine learning models trained to identify and avoid threats like Kaleidoscope before a single bid is placed.

IAS blocks impressions tied to these malicious app IDs and domains at the source — so your ad dollars don’t fund fraud.

Download the full report to learn more.

The post How IAS is Fighting Back Against the Shape-Shifting Kaleidoscope Scheme appeared first on Integral Ad Science.