Ad Fraud is a term that has shaken the entire digital advertising ecosystem in the past decade. Every year, fraudsters are becoming sophisticated and smart in stealing revenue from advertisers.
Whether it’s advertisers, publishers, or ad networks, no one is safe from the threats of cybercriminals. The legitimate publishers get their genuine clicks stolen by fraudsters. Whereas the ad networks have to see their performance suffer and campaigns fail. And the worst of all happens with the advertisers as they pay for both invalid users and organic downloads.
In this fight between the fraudsters and the digital marketing ecosystem, myths make the advertisers question the ad fraud detection vendors while the fraudsters feed on their money. Here is another myth that is making noise lately.
In this blog, we are busting this myth with some facts which will help you understand the importance of an ad fraud detection software.
What is cooking?
In the digital advertising world, publishers are spreading the word that they are not able to scale an advertiser’s business due to ad fraud detection solutions.
However, the reality is different
Publishers lose a high percentage of their revenue due to ad fraud detection solutions. For instance, if an ad fraud preventive service provider detects 70% of fraud coming from a specific source, then that particular publisher receives a payout on just 30% of the genuine traffic by the advertiser.
Publishers & MMP union
Some of the renowned Mobile measurement platforms (MMPs) also offer ad fraud detection services clubbed with their attribution services. They claim that they will detect fraud in the data attributed by them to an app advertiser and ensure that they receive clean traffic.
However, there is a catch.
The MMPs bill the advertisers based on the number of attributions. Hence, if the MMPs detect a higher number of frauds on the attributed data, they will lose revenue. Therefore, to ensure that their revenue is not impacted, the MMPs detect 10-12% of the fraud and the rest of the fraud remains undetected.
This benefits the MMPs and the publishers as they can claim higher payout from the advertisers. As the MMPs detect low fraud, the publisher encourages the agencies, advertisers, and other stakeholders to use the MMP ad fraud detection as it will eventually benefit them. This is similar to a situation where the culprit is telling to choose where to go and file a complaint to keep themselves safe. And listening to this, the advertisers fail to detect the real fraud and end up losing huge revenue.
What do advertisers miss?
Real % of Fraud: Due to less fraud reporting by MMPs, the advertisers remain in the dark regarding the actual fraud numbers. This further affects the performance of the ad campaigns, and the advertisers end up losing money twice to invalid traffic. First, they lose money to the invalid traffic before ad fraud solution. Later, they end up losing money on invalid traffic that is not reported by the MMPs.
Growth Opportunities: The advertisers use an MMP to measure the performance and get analytical data for their campaigns. However, due to less fraud reported by MMPs, the marketers stay under the impression that their campaign performance is good. Furthermore, as the marketer takes decisions based on this skewed data, they end up investing more in the wrong campaign. This further hampers the overall growth of the business.
mFilterIt Vs MMPs
In comparison to the fraud detection done by MMPs, we ensure holistic protection of advertisers from ad fraud. Our ad traffic validation suite enables:
Full-Funnel Protection
MMPs can detect the general bots, but they often miss to detect the signs of sophisticated bots in an ad campaign. As sophisticated bots can easily mimic human behavior, they are hard to detect and require an advanced solution. With our full-funnel approach, we detect sophisticated bot patterns in real-time to help advertisers take immediate action to curb the impact.
Detect New Bots Across Domains
Every day a new bot is coming, and it is hard to detect across all platforms and domains. MMPs often lose the time to respond to the threats as their systems and rules are updated once in 6 months or a year. Whereas we detect a new bot on any campaign, we ensure to flag it across all the advertisers/campaigns. This results in the protection of ad campaigns from the impact of the new bot.
Proactive Reporting
The attribution platforms provide a late ad fraud report to the advertisers. This means that if the ad fraud is detected by the 20th of a month, then the advertisers will receive the report on the 28th of that month. This further delays the process of taking preventative measures against fraudulent sources. Furthermore, it also affects the invoicing and closures at the end of the month, and even after taking so much time they fail to detect the right number of fraudulent sources.
Whereas we provide D-1 data, which means that if the fraud is detected by the 20th of the month, the advertiser gets the report on the 21st of the month. This helps the advertiser to understand the possible impact of the ad fraud and take preventative measures immediately without wasting further ad spends on irrelevant traffic. Early reporting also helps publishers to optimize better and reduce the threat of fraud.
Forget the Myth, Believe in Facts
With the fast-growing world of digital ad fraud are making their every move smarter, more discrete, and an illusion to the naked eye. To ensure your marketing efforts are not wasted, it is important to fight against fraudsters with an advanced ad traffic validation solution.
A reliable ad fraud detection and prevention solution will help to detect fraud in real time and provide holistic protection against sophisticated bots without impacting your growth. The only party affected is the publishers as their pay-out decreases when an effective ad fraud tool is in place.
It’s time to believe the data, not the myths.
