Advertisers are expected to lose an estimated $7.2 billion globally this year as a result of fraudulent impressions, according to a US report by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and White Ops.

A total of 29 ANA member companies agreed to deploy detection tags to measure bot fraud, with data collected from nearly 10 billion online ad impressions.

The volume of ad fraud experienced by participants range from 3% to 37%, up from the 2% to 22% recorded in a previous test in 2014, although average and overall rates of fraud remained unchanged year-on-year.

ANA also claimed that media with higher CPMs was more vulnerable to bots, and that programmatic ad buys displayed higher levels of fraud. Read the full findings here.

“The level of criminal, non-human traffic literally robbing marketers’ brand-building investments is a travesty,” said Bob Liodice, president and chief executive of ANA.

“The staggering financial losses and the lack of real, tangible progress at mitigating fraud highlights the importance of the industry’s Trustworthy Accountability Group in fighting this war.

“It also underscores the need for the entire marketing ecosystem to manage their media investments with far greater discipline and control against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated fraudsters.”

White Ops CEO Michael Tiffany added: “Although our study definitively demonstrates areas of improvement because parts of the industry have become laser-focused on continually tightening controls and adjusting transparency, we are still facing an uphill battle to achieve broad acceptance of the need for deeper focus on the fraud problem, and ultimately to reverse these financial trends.”