Ad fraud is not any more a storm that comes and goes, it has become the reality in the digital ecosystem. The techniques have become sophisticated, and it is going to become difficult for advertisers to differentiate between a bot and a human.
To protect the ad spends, the marketers need to adopt an advanced technique to combat the impact of ad fraud. For validating the ad traffic and helping advertisers get transparency of their traffic quality, there are ad verification solution providers.
These verification partners play a crucial role in combatting ad fraud. They help advertisers understand whether their ads are seen by bots or humans.
Advertisers, this question is for you: Is your ad fraud verification partner doing enough to protect your ads from ad fraud? More specifically, is your ad verification partner keeping up with the latest technology to protect your ad spends and ensure transparency in your campaigns?
Let us help you decode this.
Why Advertiser’s Need to Question Their Verification Partner?
Imagine this, you’re investing money in your digital campaigns, with the trust that their ad verification partners are ensuring that their ads reach real humans and not bots. However, you realize that even after validating the digital ads, your ads are exposed to ad fraud. You keep seeing weird patterns, high CTRs, low visit/click rations, fake leads, junk websites etc and you keep trying to work with your agency to optimize. But shouldn’t your Ad Verification partner take the burden of keeping your campaign from fraud?
The question the advertisers need to ask their verification partner is not “what they are doing” but “how they are doing it”. Are they still using traditional methods to validate your ad traffic that leaves your campaigns vulnerable?
Limitations of Traditional Ad Fraud Detection Technology
Many traditional ad traffic validation vendors use the 1×1 image tags, which are essentially small, invisible traffic hits embedded in ads to track impressions. While these tags are easy to integrate and cost-effective (for the verification partner), they are inefficient in identifying fraud.
It can only track impression hits and fails to validate sophisticated fraud patterns and doesn’t provide substantial insights to advertisers. It can easily be spoofed, the number of parameters it picks are only marginal, which does not allow any sophisticated fraud detection to be done.
Parameters which 1×1 can pick:
- IP Address: This is now getting anonymized (courtesy apple, relay etc) which means it is a low confidence signal.
- User Agent: Most browsers now reduce the data sent in the user-agent and only put an indication of the device, stripping it from everything.
- Referral URL: Where did the user come from. It can also be spoofed and again is a low confidence signal.
That’s it. Infact 1×1 is so weak that you can trigger it from your laptop repeatedly and all of those will get tracked. Its value is limited to counting impressions (and limited to that as well) rather than detecting fraud. It was more suitable for ad-servers like Sizmek etc. and not IVT vendors like DV/IAS etc.
Even worse, some partners claim they’re using advanced technology while still deploying 1×1 tags in the background.
Here’s why 1×1 tags are not enough to combat ad fraud:
- They only count impressions: These tags cannot give deep insights into whether the impressions were generated by bots or humans.
- No fraud detection: They lack the ability to identify patterns that signal fraudulent activity.
- Limited campaign insights: Critical metrics such as viewability, engagement, and location cannot be tracked.
- Easily spoofed: The metrics can be easily spoofed as there is no transparency of where the traffic came from.
Why, then, do some traditional ad verification partners still use them? Because they’re simple to implement and allow verification providers to check the box without delivering real value to advertisers.
Convenience over value
Imagine you as an advertiser ask an IVT vendor to support publisher A. Publisher A is excited for the campaign you are providing and works with IVT vendor to be onboarded. Publisher A and the IVT vendor BOTH want to get this started asap, since there is money from the campaign to be made. They will take the easy route of integrating a 1×1 which is basically the simplest to plug in. Both will proudly declare to you how they are now “certified” partners and advertisers can now go ahead with 100% confidence that their campaigns are safe.
Compounded with the fact that processing a 1×1 is generally 10x cheaper than a tag like VPAID or VAST. And the IVT vendor makes the same money from you across either tag (generally they charge on %age of media which is agnostic to the tag being used)
But what if I told you that there are much better tech tags available. But your IVT vendor has lazily chosen the cheapest and fastest to plug in tag rather than consider your best interest in their mind?
Advertisers, It’s Time to Clear the Smoke
The technology used by these traditional ad fraud detection vendors is not enough to combat evolving ad fraud techniques. Their schemes are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. To detect these sophisticated frauds, advertisers need a solution that can go beyond the basic checks.
Countering the 1×1 tags, there are JavaScript Tags and VAST tags, which help give a holistic coverage, providing deeper insights into traffic quality, user behavior, and potential red flags.
Here’s what sets them apart:
- Comprehensive fraud detection: They can evaluate up to 70-80 parameters, including location, device type, session patterns, and viewability metrics. JS tags are a piece of code which runs on the client website / video player picking up many data points to detect how the ad is being served, visible, obstructions to it, content on the page, browser parameters, mouse parameters, screen size etc. which is very powerful in detecting the fraud.
- Real-time insights: These technologies can detect and act on fraud indicators in real-time, reducing wasted ad spend.
- Better campaign performance: By identifying and eliminating fraudulent traffic, they ensure your budget is spent on genuine engagement.
These tools might cost more (approximately 12-14 times more than traditional 1×1 to your IVT vendor) – but the return on investment on this cost is multifolds. With advanced ad fraud detection, you’re not just paying for verification, you’re securing your campaigns against revenue-draining fraud. And if you are working on a percentage of media with your verification partner, none of the above costs are coming out of your pocket.
At mFIlterIt, we are setting a new standard of ad verification by providing advertisers with the transparency and trust they deserve. Our technology is ensuring to go beyond the traditional methods and use advanced technology like JavaScript Tags and Vast to identify sophisticated form of bot traffic and many more advanced fraud techniques.
Our technology provides full-funnel coverage, which includes more than just impressions tracking. We track heuristic and behavioral patterns to identify human-like bot patterns actively, prevent overexposure of ads and ensure that the campaigns reach a genuine audience. By investing in this advanced technology, we enable advertisers to:
- Reduce ad fraud: Protect your budget by filtering out invalid traffic.
- Optimize performance: Focus on genuine engagement and meaningful outcomes by targeting clean traffic sources.
- Build trust: Deliver transparency to the stakeholders, creating confidence in your campaigns with clean data.
What Advertisers Should Do
If you’re tired of seeing your ad spend vanish into the void, it’s time to take action. Here’s how:
- Audit Your Verification Partner: Ask tough questions about their technology stack. Do they use 1×1 tags or advanced tools like JavaScript Tags and VAST? If yes, then consider whether you even need to use that tag, since it will be pointless and detect nothing for you.
- Demand Transparency: Insist on real-time reporting and detailed insights into your traffic quality. Ask verification partners to call out publishers who are not supporting anything apart from 1×1 and allow advertisers to decide where to route their business.
- Invest in advanced technology: Choose partners who prioritize advanced technology and stay ahead of evolving fraud trends.
The Way Forward
Ad fraud isn’t slowing down, and neither should your defenses. Don’t settle for outdated solutions that merely scratch the surface. Instead, choose verification partners who offer advanced technologies to tackle the problem head-on.
Because in today’s digital ecosystem, it’s not just about counting impressions—it’s about making every impression count.
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