Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm Manuela Saragossa.

Coming up, advertising on the internet.

Is it worth the cost?

Suspicious patterns in data might indicate that that's not human,

that's either viewing or clicking or interacting with an ad.

How robots and fake traffic have become a big problem in digital advertising. Plus, why setting targets in business isn't

always a good idea. People responded by taking their own initiative to open credit card

accounts in the name of these customers as a way of fulfilling

the target. Once word of this got out, it did tremendous damage to the reputation of the firm.

That's all in Business Daily from the BBC.

Last year in the US alone, marketers spent $88 billion on digital advertising. That's according to a report by the accountancy firm, PWC. It's a figure on the rise as more and more of us move away from traditional forms of media like television to spend time on computers and mobile phones. But if you're the company buying this digital advertising space,

how do you know that the ads you're paying someone to place online are actually seen by real

people and not robots? How do you even know if anyone at all is seeing them? Well, not easily is the

answer, because digital ad fraud appears to be a growing problem. Alex

Hewson is managing partner of MNC Sachi, the mobile unit of the advertising giant. I asked him,

just how big a problem is it? Massive. Last year, it was estimated to be $16.4 billion globally.

That could mean that they were being viewed by non-human eyes, so what we would call

a bot, or could be misrepresented where you're claiming credit for an organic or natural

user where you think it's a paid one. You have a lot of very bad actors in that ecosystem.

Tracking systems are being manipulated in a way that means that the data we get back is

being misrepresented.

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