Ad Fraud is not a term anymore that needs an introduction for marketers. There is frequent news about how fraudsters are evolving and stealing billions of dollars from marketers every year.
As marketers are getting creative with their digital marketing efforts, fraudsters are also upgrading their fraud techniques.
And as the fraudsters attempt to enter the new paid media realms like connected TV (CTV), the marketers have to become more vigilant.
Meanwhile, the fraud security professionals have focused majorly on identity and payment fraud, the fraudsters have spread their horizons to trick the security professionals.
They have evolved over time and came up with other forms of fraud methods like:
- Ecommerce Fraud
- Credential Stuffing
- Web Recon
- Malvertising
Seeing the current threats from cybercriminals, it has become essential for marketers to collaborate with a holistic ad fraud detection and prevention solution. If you’re still not convinced, below we have covered the impact of ad fraud on vulnerable marketing and what is the solution.
Impact of Ad Fraud on Vulnerable Marketing
- Lost Revenue: When the bots attack the marketing campaigns, an advertiser’s ad budget takes a toll. The advertisers are under the impression that their ad campaigns are attracting a load of traffic. However, the reality is that the traffic generated by bots is a waste. Even after investing a huge ad budget, the marketers neither get genuine traffic nor they are able to improve their ROI.
- Skewed Analytics: The success of an ad campaign is analyzed based on various metrics like site visits, clicks, and installs. However, when attacked by bots, these campaign data become skewed and give irrelevant data generated by bots from the campaign performance. This may further mislead the marketing teams into thinking their campaigns are performing well when in reality they are not.
- Poor Customer Experience: The brands attacked by the fraudsters do not just end up losing revenue, they have to deal with other problems related to the consumers. When the user clicks on a fraudulent ad, they have to incur problems like forced redirects or unauthorized malware installation. And, as a result, the consumer blames the brand for the inconvenience instead of considering it a fraudulent attack.
- Damage to Customer Trust: When a fraudster attacks a website or app, the consumer’s data is at risk. For instance, due to credential stuffing, the safety of the consumer’s account is compromised. The fraudsters hack their account to steal gift certificates and credit cards saved with the account. Furthermore, the brands lose time and money to invalid traffic while the genuine customers drift away upon feeling cheated.
Holistic Way to Combat Ad Fraud
Full-Funnel Model: For a marketing team, fraud detection must mean more than just eliminating fraud from ad campaigns. They must focus on other aspects like improved ROI and conversion rate along with cleaner traffic. To ensure this, the marketing team must focus on a full-funnel fraud detection model. This will help to eliminate the impact of sophisticated bots across the funnel.
Real-Time Data Update: The marketing team must ensure to get real-time updates to take immediate action against ad fraud. With real-time ad fraud detection, marketers can optimize their ad campaigns before any serious loss. Due to real-time fraud detection, marketers can take an informed decision against fraudulent sources and protect their ad campaigns from the impact of fraud.
Log-Level Data Analysis: To reduce false positives and take accurate measures against the sources of ad fraud, the marketers must have log-level data. By analyzing the log-level fraud data, the marketers can get an insight into the fraud sources, techniques, and how it is impacting their ad campaign. With the help of this detailed summary of fraud, marketers can take an informed decision for taking preventative actions.
How mFilterIt can protect your marketing spends?
To prevent wastage of ad spends on invalid traffic, our Ad Traffic Validation suite does deep checks to detect fraud at every stage of the sales funnel. Furthermore, our solution is equipped with features like real-time reporting and log-level fraud data. This helps the marketers to get a better understanding of how ad fraud has impacted their ad campaigns.
Alongside this, we also ensure to do a transaction-level fraud analysis to detect fraudulent sources and
blacklist them in real-time.
Conclusion
Ad fraud prevention is not a choice anymore for the marketing teams. No matter how much effort is given to optimize the ad campaigns, if the fraudsters manage to seep through the process, they can rip off all the ad spends.
Thus, the marketing efforts must combine with a holistic ad fraud detection & prevention solution to ensure that the traffic coming on campaigns is – Clean Traffic AKA Real Humans.
To ensure that your ad campaigns stay protected from ad fraud, get in touch with our ad fraud experts today!
