The latest ANA (Association of National Advertisers) Programmatic Transparency Benchmark for Q1 2026 has laid bare a divide that forensic analytics practitioners have been flagging for years. Higher-performing advertisers converted 54.0 per cent of programmatic spend into qualified impressions in Q1 2026, while lower-performing advertisers converted just 32.1 per cent; a 21.9-point gap that is the largest the benchmark has ever recorded. The ANA characterises this divergence as ‘increasingly structural,’ driven not by luck or budget size, but by deliberate quality management.
The market-level TrueAdSpend Index, which measures the share of programmatic investment delivering fraud-free, measurable, viewable, and MFA-free impressions, rebounded to 43.3 per cent in Q1 2026 following volatility in late 2025. Put plainly, even in a recovery quarter, more than half of every programmatic dollar still failed to reach a verified human being.
The ANA says the benchmark is “built on log-level data from major advertisers and platforms.” It demonstrates that the difference between the top and bottom cohorts lies not in how much they spend, but in how rigorously they measure.
But Marc Dhalluin, co-founder of TruthsetsOnline.com, the forensic media analytics consultancy powered by FouAnalytics, says the findings may be too conservative. “Our research generally shows a more dramatic difference. However, it’s clear that advertisers who invest in genuine forensic transparency are effectively paying less for more. While those who rely solely on legacy verification tools are burning through budget they cannot account for,” said Dhalluin.
The cost gap is more alarming than it appears
According to the report, when adjusted for quality, using the benchmark’s TrueCPM methodology, higher-performing advertisers paid $7.46 per thousand qualified impressions, compared with $19.04 for the lower-performing cohort. The report found a $1.95 CPM difference becomes an $11.58 TrueCPM difference once waste is accounted for. Lower-performing advertisers lost 38.4 per cent of their spend to media quality issues, more than double the 19.0 per cent lost by higher-performing advertisers.
This is the hidden multiplication effect of programmatic waste: a modest-looking CPM gap compounds dramatically once non-viewability, made-for-advertising (MFA) exposure, and numerous other causes of wasted impressions are factored in.
An independent analysis of 105.7 billion impressions collected throughout 2025 found a global invalid traffic (IVT) rate of 20.64 per cent, suggesting that approximately $37 billion in US advertiser dollars may be associated with invalid traffic (IVT) annually.
“These numbers are not abstract,” said Dhalluin. “For a South African brand spending R10 million a year in programmatic, a 38 per cent quality loss means roughly R3.8 million that evaporates before a single real consumer sees your message. This is both a media efficiency and measurement problem, and it is almost entirely solvable.”
AI is accelerating the problem, not solving it
The Q1 2026 benchmark identified AI-generated fake websites designed purely to harvest ad revenue as an emerging subtype of MFA exposure requiring ongoing mitigation, with MFA exposure increasing to 1.1 per cent in Q1 2026 after remaining between 0.4 and 0.6 per cent throughout 2025. While 1.1 per cent may sound marginal, it represents a near-doubling from the prior year’s baseline, and independent campaign-level data from FouAnalytics consistently records MFA and other nefarious activity at far higher rates than the industry average suggests.
The concern is compounded by the rapid proliferation of AI-generated websites. Where fraudsters once needed technical skill to build fake publisher sites at scale, generative AI has effectively industrialised the process, enabling anyone to spin up thousands of convincing-looking content sites in hours. Legacy fraud detection tools, largely reliant on probabilistic sampling, struggle to keep pace.
Forensic analytics: seeing what legacy tools miss
TruthsetsOnline.com operates on a fundamentally different model from standard verification vendors. Rather than sampling a fraction of ad impressions and extrapolating a fraud rate, the FouAnalytics platform triangulates over 300 variables per impression, including live touch events, scroll behaviour, and mouse movement patterns, to confirm, ultimately, if and exactly where an ad was shown, its viewable status by a human, and whether a real human was present. Every finding is supported by data that clients can inspect directly.
“We call this the glass box approach,” said Dhalluin. “Standard tools give you a number and ask you to trust it. We show you exactly which sites, which apps, and which impressions triggered a flag, and we explain in plain language why. When a bot clicks a consent button 4,000 times from the exact same pixel location, that is not a probabilistic inference; it is forensic evidence.”
Brands working with TruthsetsOnline.com typically recover between 20 and 60 per cent of their marketing spend, a budget that can be immediately redirected from fake impressions to real, high-value human audiences.
The performance gap is a choice
The ANA’s own research makes the most compelling argument: the best advertisers are getting better at extracting value from every dollar, while the lower-performing cohort commits too much spend to inventory that is not delivering value. The structural nature of this gap suggests it will only widen as quality-focused advertisers compound their advantages quarter by quarter.
“The benchmark shows that programmatic quality is accessible to any brand willing to measure forensically. The first step is simply seeing the truth, and that is exactly what we help brands do.”
TruthsetsOnline.com offers a no-disruption campaign audit, deploying forensic tags alongside existing tools to produce a plain-language comparison of human-verified data against legacy vendor reports. No overhaul of existing technology is required to begin.
For more information or to arrange a free consultation, visit www.truthsetsonline.com.
About TruthsetsOnline.com
TruthsetsOnline.com is a forensic media analytics consultancy powered by the FouAnalytics platform. Founded by Marc Dhalluin and Jonathan Pigden, the company helps brands and agencies across Africa and internationally to identify programmatic waste, recover misdirected budget, and redirect spend to verified human audiences. Unlike traditional verification vendors, TruthsetsOnline.com provides deterministic, impression-level evidence rather than probabilistic sampling.
About FouAnalytics
FouAnalytics, founded by Dr Augustine Fou, is an independent digital advertising analytics platform that uses on-site and in-ad measurement to detect bots, invalid traffic, and other forms of ad fraud across programmatic, search, social, and CTV campaigns.