Glossary
What each label and tooltip in the Media Ratings Terminal means, for CTV apps, mobile apps, websites and Discovery.
This glossary defines the labels you see on Insight pages in the Media Ratings Terminal (MRT), the same text the MRT shows in its tooltips. Jump to a supply type:
- CTV apps: Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV and Apple TV (tvOS)
- Mobile apps: Google Play and the Apple App Store
- Websites
- Discovery columns
Not every label appears for every platform, because each app store provides different data.
For the specific IVT types the MRT reports under SIVT Types and GIVT Types, see the IVT taxonomy. For the Audience Engagement widget, see Audience engagement.
Labels on every supply type
These labels appear on Insight pages for apps and websites.
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Risk Overview | Pixalate’s advertising risk assessment, based on blended risk factors including brand safety, invalid traffic and ad inventory. |
| Pixalate Advisories | Pixalate’s list of key advisories for the app or domain, based on risk factors such as app-ads.txt or ads.txt, app permissions and privacy terms. |
| MFA Risk | Pixalate’s assessment of the risk that the app or website is made for advertising (MFA), based on Pixalate’s MFA detection methodology. |
| Ad Refresh Rate | How often new ad impressions are presented to a user. A sub-signal of MFA risk. |
| Clawback Warning | Pixalate’s record of invalid traffic (IVT) or ad fraud clawbacks reported against the app or domain in the last 12 months. See Clawback report. |
| General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) | Traffic deterministically judged to be non-human. High to very high risk. |
| Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) | Traffic probabilistically judged to be non-human, using advanced statistical detection methods. Moderate to high risk. |
All IVT calculations are derived from standardized definitions of invalid traffic maintained by the Media Rating Council (MRC), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG).
CTV apps
These labels appear on Insight pages for CTV apps on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV and Apple TV (tvOS). CTV data in the MRT is refreshed weekly. Each app store structures its data differently, so the same label can look slightly different from one platform to another.
CTV overview and risk
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Programmatic Popularity Rank | The app’s Top Grossing rank in the Publisher Trust Index, based on estimated programmatic spend. See Publisher Trust Index. |
| Risk Score | Pixalate’s overall advertising risk score, based on blended risk factors including brand safety, invalid traffic and ad inventory. |
| IVT | The overall percentage of invalid traffic (IVT) associated with advertising transactions for the app. This includes IVT in server-side ad insertion (SSAI) traffic. |
| Est. SSAI | The percentage of traffic observed to use server-side ad insertion (SSAI) to deliver ads or ad content to the end user. This includes both valid and invalid SSAI, so it doesn’t correspond to the IVT percentage. |
| Est. Transparent SSAI | SSAI impressions that come from proxies passing X-Device-User-Agent headers, which gives more transparency. See Transparent SSAI. |
| Brand Safety Risk | Risk factors to advertiser brand safety, broken down by in-app content, such as images, and the app’s descriptive text. |
Transparent SSAI
Transparent SSAI is a Pixalate term. It means the SSAI provider passes Pixalate extra data about the device, which lets Pixalate verify that the SSAI is legitimate. A higher Transparent SSAI share is better. If an app has SSAI traffic but no Transparent SSAI, the provider isn’t using VAST 4.0 or later.
CTV app spoofing
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| App Spoofing | Traffic where the app identifier (for example, the bundle ID) reported to the exchange doesn’t match the characteristics of the app detected by Pixalate. |
| Apparent Victim of Spoofing | Whether a significant number of impressions detected for the app may be misrepresented in advertising transactions. |
| Potential Bundle Id Spoofing Risk | The risk that the app is misrepresented in advertising transactions and ads are delivered to a different app or site. |
| Impression Volume Obfuscation | The app’s traffic is associated with potential background activity that fires multiple impressions at once. |
| Device Obfuscation | The app’s traffic comes from obfuscated device identifiers. |
| User Agent Obfuscation | The user agent (UA) detected by Pixalate doesn’t match the UA passed in the bid request. |
See App spoofing.
CTV app details
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| App Details | Key platform-specific details for the app. |
| App Information | Detailed app-specific information. |
| In store (for example, In Roku Store) | The app store is returning data for the app. Most apps are listed, but some apps that users can install aren’t listed in stores, such as pirated movie apps. |
| Owner Domain | The business domain of the app’s owner, as declared in the app’s app-ads.txt file. |
| Keywords | Search terms and keywords typically associated with the app. |
| App’s Privacy Policy | Whether an app-specific privacy policy is maintained. Apps without a privacy policy may be higher risk to advertisers and sellers. |
| Revenue Sources | The app’s primary sources of revenue (for example, ads or in-app subscriptions), as cited in the app store. |
| CVAA Compliant | Whether the app complies with the FCC’s Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) standards, which make digital media more accessible to people with disabilities, for example through closed captioning. CVAA compliance is required for premium OTT/CTV video on demand (VoD) content (such as TVoD), subscription VoD (SVoD) content and content delivered through traditional cable outlets. |
| App Age | How long the app has been listed in the app store. Apps listed for a long time may present less risk than recently published ones. Pixalate also rates App Age Risk as low or high, based on the published date; newer, less established apps may be riskier for advertising. App age risk can feed into the app’s overall risk. |
| Published Date | The date the app was first published in the app store. |
| Bundle ID | The app’s unique text identifier in the app store. On Roku, this is often called the Channel ID. See CTV bundle IDs. |
Where the app store provides them, Category and Developer come from the store itself (for example, Roku’s own categories).
CTV developer overview
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Developer Overview | Essential information about the app’s developer. |
| Name | The business name of the app’s developer. |
| Total Apps | The total number of apps available from the developer. |
| WHOIS Info Hidden | Businesses with privately registered, anonymous domains are flagged as high risk. |
| Terms and Conditions | Businesses without published terms and conditions on their website are flagged as high risk to advertisers and sellers. |
| Privacy Policy | Whether there’s a privacy policy on the app publisher’s or developer’s website. Businesses without one are flagged as high risk to advertisers and sellers. |
CTV rankings, COPPA and channels
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Rankings by Country | The app’s market share and reach rankings by country. |
| Global Reach Ranking by Country | The app’s reach ranking in each country. |
| Global Market Share Ranking by Country | The app’s market share ranking in each country. |
| COPPA Audience (edit) | Select the pencil icon to suggest an edit to the app’s COPPA audience. |
| Privacy Policy (COPPA) | Whether Pixalate can detect a privacy policy. The COPPA Rule requires a site or app to have a privacy policy that explicitly describes how it handles the data of children under 13. |
| Transmits Residential IP | Whether the app transmits a residential IP address, such as the Wi-Fi IP address, from which location can be determined. The COPPA Rule requires verifiable parental consent before collecting geolocation information from children under 13. |
| Transmits Location | Whether the app transmits location as latitude and longitude coordinates. The COPPA Rule requires verifiable parental consent before collecting geolocation information from children under 13. |
| Channels | The channels available in apps that act as aggregators or providers of “skinny bundles”: streaming services, such as Sling TV, that bundle a smaller, more targeted set of channels than a traditional cable package. |
For more on COPPA risk, see COPPA compliance tools.
CTV brand safety
Brand safety risk has two parts: description risk, from analysis of the app’s text, and content risk, from analysis of the app’s images. Content risk isn’t shown for every platform.
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Brand Safety | The combined risk to advertiser brand safety from all the risk factors below, based on both descriptive text and content analysis. |
| Description Risk | The overall brand safety risk based on textual analysis of the app’s descriptive text. The text is processed with natural language algorithms and categorical dictionaries to predict brand safety risk. |
| Advisories | The risk to brand safety derived from the app’s content advisories. |
| Adult Content (description) | The risk from adult-themed content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Drug Content | The risk from drug-themed content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Alcohol Content | The risk from alcohol-themed content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Hate Speech | The risk from hate speech, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Offensive Content | The risk from offensive language, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Violence Content | The risk from potential violent imagery and content detected in the app. |
| Content Risk | The overall brand safety risk based on computer-vision image analysis and textual analysis of language extracted from images of the app’s content. |
| Adult Content (content) | The risk from potential adult images and content detected in the app. |
| Image Text Extraction | Text detected in the app’s images, shown with descriptive labels and probabilities. |
CTV traffic and sellers
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Traffic Trends | The most common user journeys from app to app. It uses shared users to connect apps and to build relationships across a series of apps. |
| Traffic Overview | Traffic volume and ad inventory estimates for the app, with the associated advertising risk factors. |
| Advertising IVT Risk | The risk that advertising impressions delivered to the app are invalid traffic (IVT). |
| Trusted Seller | Pixalate’s rating of the sellers representing the app, based on factors including audience reach and invalid traffic risk. |
| IVT Free Users | The percentage of the app’s users who aren’t responsible for invalid traffic. |
| Est. Daily Reach | The app’s estimated daily reach. |
| Est. Monthly Reach | The app’s estimated monthly reach. |
| Authorized Seller (App-Ads.txt) | How much each sell-side platform contributes to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
| Direct Sellers | How much direct sellers contribute to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
| Reseller | How much resellers, such as intermediaries, contribute to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
| Unauthorized Seller | How much unauthorized sellers (sellers not in the app’s app-ads.txt file) contribute to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
CTV apps use app-ads.txt, the same file as mobile apps, to declare their authorized sellers.
CTV inventory
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Inventory | The estimated volume of ad impressions the app offers through programmatic advertising platforms and exchanges. |
| Inventory by Region | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by business region. |
| Inventory by Ad Size | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by ad size. |
| Inventory by DMA | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by Designated Market Area (DMA). |
Mobile apps
These labels appear on Insight pages for mobile apps in Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Mobile overview and risk
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Developer | The app’s developer. You can suggest an edit to this value. |
| IAB Primary Category | The app’s primary IAB content category. You can suggest an edit to this value. |
| IAB Subcategory | The app’s IAB content subcategory. You can suggest an edit to this value. |
| Programmatic Popularity Rank | The app’s Top Grossing rank in the Publisher Trust Index, based on estimated programmatic spend. See Publisher Trust Index. |
| Smartphone | Blended advertiser risk assessment for the app on smartphones, by global business region. |
| Tablet | Blended advertiser risk assessment for the app on tablets, by global business region. |
| IVT | The overall percentage of invalid traffic (IVT) associated with advertising transactions for the app. |
| Viewability | The average viewability of all display ad impressions in the app. |
| Brand Safety Risk | The overall risk to advertiser brand safety from the app. |
Mobile app details
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| App Details | Key platform-specific details for the app. |
| App Information | Detailed app-specific information. |
| Device Availability | The types of devices the app is available on (Apple App Store apps). |
| Owner Domain | The business domain of the app’s owner, as declared in the app’s app-ads.txt file. |
| Interactive Elements | What information the app can access, what it can do with it, and whether it contains user-generated content that may be outside the developer’s control. |
| Users Interact | Whether the app contains user-generated content that may be unfiltered or uncensored by the developer, as in most social apps. |
| Shares Info | Whether the app can share your personal information with third parties, as most social apps can. |
| Digital Purchases | Whether the app lets you make purchases, as shopping apps do. |
| Ad Capabilities | Detailed ad capabilities. |
| Top Device | The platform most commonly trafficked in programmatic advertising. |
| Display Top Size | The display ad size most commonly trafficked in programmatic advertising. |
| Video Top Ad Size | The video ad size most commonly trafficked in programmatic advertising. |
| Video Contribution | The percentage of video ads trafficked in the app. |
| Display Contribution | The percentage of display ads trafficked in the app. |
| Hyperlocation Availability | The percentage of advertising transactions that contain the user’s latitude and longitude. |
| MRAID Version | The most recent MRAID version the app complies with. |
| Ads Detected | Whether ads were detected in the app. Apps that don’t appear to be ad-supported may be at risk of spoofing. |
Mobile developer overview
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Developer Overview | Essential information about the app’s developer. |
| Location | The developer’s business address. |
| WHOIS Info Hidden | Businesses with privately registered, anonymous domains are flagged as high risk. |
| Terms and Conditions Detected | Businesses without published terms and conditions are flagged as high risk. |
| Privacy Policy Detected | Businesses without a privacy policy are flagged as high risk. |
| Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter | Low social media engagement on that platform can be a risk factor. |
Mobile rankings, permissions and COPPA
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Rankings by Country | The app’s market share and reach rankings by country. |
| Global Reach Ranking by Country | The app’s reach ranking in each country. |
| Global Market Share Ranking by Country | The app’s market share ranking in each country. |
| IVT Risk (App Permission Risk) | Google Play apps only. The IVT risk based on the combined risk of the permissions the app requests. See Android app permissions and IVT risk. |
| COPPA Audience (edit) | Select the pencil icon to suggest an edit to the app’s COPPA audience. |
| Privacy Policy (COPPA) | Whether Pixalate can detect a privacy policy. The COPPA Rule requires a site or app to have a privacy policy that explicitly describes how it handles the data of children under 13. |
| Sensitive Permissions | Whether the app requests permissions such as access to the device’s contacts, calendar, camera or microphone. These permissions let apps collect personal information from users. |
| Verifiable Parental Consent (VPC) | Whether the app seeks verifiable parental consent, as the COPPA Rule requires, before collecting, using or disclosing personal information from children under 13. |
| Transmits Residential IP | Whether the app transmits a residential IP address, such as the Wi-Fi IP address, from which location can be determined. The COPPA Rule requires verifiable parental consent before collecting geolocation information from children under 13. |
| Transmits Location | Whether the app transmits location as latitude and longitude coordinates. The COPPA Rule requires verifiable parental consent before collecting geolocation information from children under 13. |
For more on COPPA risk, see COPPA compliance tools.
Mobile brand safety
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Brand Safety | Risk factors to advertiser brand safety, broken down by in-app content, such as images, and the app’s descriptive text. |
| Description Brand Safety Risk | The brand safety risk predicted by processing the app’s descriptive text with natural language algorithms and categorical dictionaries. |
| Advisories Risk | The risk to brand safety derived from the app’s content advisories. |
| Adult Content (description) | The risk from adult-themed content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Drug Content | The risk from drug-themed content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Alcohol Content | The risk from alcohol-themed content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Hate Speech | The risk from hate speech, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Offensive Content | The risk from offensive language, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Gambling Content | The risk from gambling-focused content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Violence Content (description) | The risk from violent content, based on textual analysis of the app and its description. |
| Content Brand Safety Risk | The overall brand safety risk based on computer-vision image analysis and textual analysis of language extracted from images of the app’s content. |
| Adult Content (content) | The risk from potential adult images and content detected in the app. |
| Violence Content (content) | The risk from potential violent imagery and content detected in the app. |
| Image Text Extraction | Text detected in the app’s images, shown with descriptive labels and probabilities. |
Mobile traffic and sellers
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Traffic Trends | The most common user journeys from app to app. It uses shared users to connect apps and to build relationships across a series of apps. |
| Traffic Overview | Traffic statistics and risk factors for the app. |
| Potential Bundle Id Spoofing Risk | The risk that the app is misrepresented in advertising transactions and ads are delivered to a different app or site. See App spoofing. |
| Location Masking Risk | The risk that location data is inaccurate in advertising transactions involving the app. |
| Advertising IVT Risk | The risk that advertising impressions delivered to the app are invalid traffic (IVT). |
| Click IVT Risk | The risk that clicks on ads in the app are fraudulent. |
| Viewability Risk | The risk that ad impressions in the app don’t meet IAB viewability standards. |
| Est. Daily Reach | The app’s estimated daily reach. |
| Est. Monthly Reach | The app’s estimated monthly reach. |
| Inventory | The estimated number of monthly impressions the app makes available programmatically. |
| Authorized Seller (App-Ads.txt) | How much each sell-side platform contributes to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
| Direct Sellers | How much direct sellers contribute to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
| Unauthorized Sellers | How much unauthorized sellers (sellers not in the app’s app-ads.txt file) contribute to the programmatic ad impressions sold on the app. |
Mobile viewability and inventory
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Viewability | The average viewability of display ads in the app, using the IAB standard of 50% in view for at least 1 second. |
| Estimated Inventory | The estimated volume of ad impressions the app offers through programmatic advertising platforms and exchanges. |
| Inventory by Devices | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by device. |
| Inventory by Region | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by business region. |
| Inventory by Ad Size | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by ad size. |
| Inventory by DMA | Estimated programmatic ad impressions by Designated Market Area (DMA). |
Websites
These labels appear on Insight pages for websites (domains).
Website risk
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| IVT Overview | The overall percentage of invalid traffic (IVT) associated with advertising transactions for the domain. |
| Desktop | Blended advertiser risk assessment for the domain on desktop, by global business region. |
| Mobile | Blended advertiser risk assessment for the domain on mobile phones, by global business region. |
| WHOIS Info Hidden | Whether the domain is private, meaning it’s registered as anonymous in the WHOIS registration data. |
| Corporate Email | Whether a corporate email address (not from a free email provider) is associated with the domain. |
| Brand Safety Risk | Risk levels for each brand safety category, assessed at the homepage (root domain) level. |
| Social Media Engagement | Active engagement levels on various social platforms. |
Website MFA risk
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ad Density | How densely ad placements are presented to a user. A sub-signal of MFA risk. |
| Social Traffic Rate | How much of the website’s traffic comes from social media. |
| Paid Traffic Rate | How much of the website’s traffic comes from paid (ad) sources. |
For MFA Risk and Ad Refresh Rate, see Labels on every supply type.
Website IVT and viewability
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| GIVT% | The percentage of general invalid traffic (GIVT): traffic deterministically judged to be non-human. High to very high risk. |
| SIVT% | The percentage of sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT): traffic probabilistically judged to be non-human. Moderate to high risk. |
| Global Viewability | The average viewability percentage of valid traffic, for all ad sizes and traffic types on the domain. |
Website referral traffic
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Social | The percentage of the domain’s traffic that comes from social media. |
| Direct | The percentage of the domain’s traffic that comes from users typing the web address in their browser or clicking a bookmark. |
| Search | The percentage of the domain’s traffic that comes from search engines. |
| Discovery | The percentage of the domain’s traffic that comes from widgets or links on other websites. |
| The percentage of the domain’s traffic that comes from email. |
Discovery columns
These are the tooltips for columns in Discovery. The Discovery page lists every column.
| Supply type | Column | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| CTV apps | MFA Risk | Pixalate’s assessment of the risk that the app is made for advertising (MFA), based on Pixalate’s MFA detection methodology. |
| Mobile apps | Est. Inventory | The estimated number of monthly impressions the app makes available programmatically. |
| Mobile apps | Viewability | The average viewability of all display ad impressions in the app. |
| Mobile apps | Est. IVT | The percentage of invalid traffic associated with advertising transactions for the app. |
| Mobile apps | Blocklisted | The app is on a Pixalate high-risk block list. To subscribe to the block lists, contact your Pixalate account manager. See Pre-bid data feeds. |
| Mobile apps | MFA Risk | Pixalate’s assessment of the risk that the app is made for advertising (MFA), based on Pixalate’s MFA detection methodology. |
| Mobile apps | Brand Safety Risk | Risk factors to advertiser brand safety, broken down by in-app content, such as images, and the app’s descriptive text. |
| Mobile apps | Incentivized App | Whether the app is an incentivized app. |
| Mobile apps | User Generated Content | Whether the app has user-generated content. |
| Websites | Viewability | The average viewability percentage of valid traffic, for all ad sizes and traffic types on the domain. |
| Websites | IVT | The total percentage of non-human traffic measured on the domain. |
Related
Read an Insights report
Find your way around an Insight page.
MRT FAQ
How risk levels, IVT rates and brand safety are determined.
Enrichment API
Get the same data programmatically.
Questions? Email support@pixalate.com.