The main findings of the report include the fact that the majority of marketers – 61 percent – are either “slightly familiar or not at all” with sourced traffic. Moreover, 54 percent didn’t know if their company’s digital media buys include sourced traffic.

Sourced traffic refers to different methods that digital media sellers use to acquire visitors through third parties. Typically, a publisher pays a third party to send users to its site for instance by advertising on other publishers’ sites.

The main issue is that the traffic delivered this way is likely to be less valuable than the publisher’s own audience, possibly being entirely outside the targeted demographic. Sourced traffic also results in a higher lever of bot fraud, i.e. traffic that is not originating from humans. More information about sourced traffic and problems related to it can be found in the ANA report.

The ANA recommends concrete actions for advertisers to try to improve the situation, mostly encouraging them to try to understand the issue and request transparency from publishers.

See also: a particularly biting view on the matter, and our earlier article on the shortcomings of online metrics.