Festive Season: Digital Analytics, Brand Protection and Market Intelligence is the way forward for Brands 

The sale season is on! Brands are in the beast mode, exploring every possibility, tapping on every opportunity to boost sales and max out during the season.  But it’s not done yet with the biggest Indian festival. With Diwali about fever growing followed by a massive global Black Friday sale event, the shopping season is about to get more interesting.  

However, there are some roadblocks in seamlessly navigating the digital landscape that start with grabbing eyeballs with your ads, seeing which channels are giving the best results and building ad fraud analytics to monitor. Protecting your brand against IPR infringement and counterfeits is another critical aspect for a strong brand reputation and continued financial growth.  

Those with a strong ecommerce presence should look at competitor metrics to focus on competitive intelligence to improve product performance vs competition on digital marketplaces. 

To build trust and transparency across the funnel to enable growth and continued opportunities, every brand needs a third-party validation and analytics tool to enable real-time monitoring and flag-off during the festive season.   

Let’s explore what challenges this festive season holds for brands and what they can do to safeguard their brand and optimize performance during the season and beyond.  

Challenges for e-commerce brands during festive season

The most obvious trend during the festive season is a massive surge in traffic on online shopping platforms, brand website ads, and social media but the challenge lies in identifying the genuine traffic converting interest into business and optimizing performance to reach the desired goals. Here are some major challenges for brands during festive season.  

Boosting Your Ad Campaign Performance 

Advertising peaks during the festive season or mega events like black Friday. But is it reaching a genuine audience? Or is your digital ad spending getting wasted? About 15-20% of ad spends go waste to bots (GIVT & SIVT) 

Ad Traffic Validation and Fraud prevention for branding and performance campaign: Ensuring the traffic coming to the site is legitimate and not fraudulent is critical for both branding and performance campaigns. This involves detecting and preventing click fraud, impression fraud, and other deceptive practices that can waste Ad spend. 

Focus on post-bid traffic analysis: Ad fraud analysis is better at the post-bid stage than pre-bid, measuring performance beyond viewability metrics. The result of a pre-bid analysis is a meager 2% fraud. This is where a post-bid analysis trumps a pre-bid impression validation. Now that we have several more parameters for ad fraud detection, approx. fraud rate is about 15-20%.  This results in improved ROI on ad spending. Therefore, post-bid analysis is a more beneficial method for detecting ad fraud. 

Active Blacklisting of IPs and Identifying unsafe Ad placements : It enables enhanced security to prevent fraud, blacklisting IPs which are a source of invalid or fraudulent IP addresses help stop malicious actors from accessing your ad campaigns. It’s a proactive brand safety measure along with identifying unsafe placement. Such measures lead to improved Ad Performance, increased ROI, prevented wasted ad spend on fraudulent or non-performing placements, and ensure your ads reach genuine and relevant audiences.  

Monitoring the Digital Shelf Across E-commerce Landscape

The fiercely competitive landscape requires brands to be on their toes before the festive season begins or during the sale season and beyond. This requires data-driven decisions, competitive analytics, and intelligence across platforms and geographies to reach the top of the digital shelf. Monitor competition on multiple KPIs across product categories, sub-categories, and product variants covering all platforms. 

1. Trends on Pricing and Availability  Stay on top of the pricing and stock availability trends across platforms with data-driven strategies, tracking of stock availability and out-of-stock status.  
2. Enhance Brand Product Page Content Improve product performance with perfect page analysis covering content, keyword share, primary and secondary content, sentiment analysis with feedback analysis including rating, reviews and question & answers.  
3. Check E-commerce Banner Ad performance: Monitoring and optimizing banner ads on e-commerce platforms via Share of Voice and banner communication analytics. Also monitor performance versus competition.  
4. Enhance E-commerce Sponsored Ad activity: Brands must optimize their sponsored ad campaigns on platforms like Amazon and Flipkart to ensure high visibility and effective spending. This includes managing bids, keywords, and ad placements to maximize return on investment.  

Ensuring Brand Safety with contextual relevancy

Any brand association with unsafe or irrelevant content is a massive threat to the brand reputation. On major video streaming platforms and generic web platforms the brand unsafe content is to the tune of 7-10%. 

• Detect unsafe ad placements: Identify unsafe ad placement of ads across digital advertising platforms be it web or video advertising. Advanced AI, ML, and open-source intelligence (OSINT) tech is used to identify unsafe ad placement along with ads running on made-for advertising sites or low-quality content.   
• Ensure contextual relevancy in ad placement: Ad placement with contextual relevancy helps contextually target audience. Contextual Ad placement ensures relevant leads and boost engagement with the advertising campaigns.  

Brand Protection: Safeguarding from Impersonation and infringement

The major cause of trust erosion of customers is brand impersonation and brand infringement cases misleading users, damaging brand reputation, and incur financial losses.  

1. Brand Impersonation via Fake website and Social Media Handles: During the festive season, the risk of brand impersonation increases. Fraudsters create fake websites and social media profiles to deceive customers and steal sensitive information. 
2. Infringement of brand Assets and counterfeits: Misuse of brand logo/trademark infringement on counterfeit products to dupe customers during festive season and beyond leads to massive financial losses for brands.  
3. Misleading or Fake Offers on WhatsApp & Telegram: Messaging platforms are extensively used by unauthorized affiliates using brand name to hijack traffic or creative incentive-based campaigns and promotional offers.  

Add Transparency in Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Fraud Detection

1. Affiliates bid on an advertiser’s brand keywords: In search engines to intercept traffic that should go directly to the advertiser, thereby claiming the commission for any resulting sales. Brand Bidding involves affiliates bidding on brand-related terms to divert search traffic to their own affiliate links instead of the advertiser’s official site. 
2. Incentivized Traffic: Offering incentives such as cashbacks, points, or rewards to users for clicking on affiliate links, can lead to low-quality traffic that doesn’t convert into real sales. Intercepting a legitimate affiliate’s traffic by changing the affiliate links to their own, thus stealing the commissions. 

How mFilterIt Can Help Optimize Performance Across Your Digital Journey?

Brands can navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, optimize their marketing efforts, and protect their brand integrity during the festive season and beyond. 

Ad Traffic Validation and Fraud Prevention with Full-Funnel Coverage 

Ensure Genuine Engagement: 

•    Validate ad traffic to ensure it is legitimate, preventing click fraud, impression fraud, and other deceptive practices. 
•    Ensure that clicks convert to genuine visits and meaningful engagements. 

 Full-Funnel Protection with Post-Bid Analysis Focus: 

•    Protect your advertising investments across the entire marketing funnel, from impressions to conversions. 
•    Use advanced AI and machine learning techniques to detect and prevent fraud at every stage. 

 Optimize Ad Campaign Performance with Active Blacklisting: 

•   Optimize channel management with real time active blacklisting and granular level analysis  
• Ensure high visibility and effective spending, particularly during peak seasons and mega-events with frequency cap monitors 

Competitive Analytics & Intelligence Across E-commerce and Quick Commerce Platforms 

 Comprehensive Competitive Monitoring: 

• Track competitor activities across multiple KPIs, including product categories, sub-categories, and product variants. 
• Monitor pricing trends, stock availability, and promotional activities across various platforms and geographies.
• Identify performance gaps and explore opportunities to maintain brand consistency and competitive edge. 

Data-Driven Strategies: 

• Utilize data analytics to understand market trends, customer preferences, and competitive actions. 
• Make informed decisions to optimize product listings, pricing, and promotional strategies. 

 Brand Safety and Protection Across the Digital Ecosystem 

 Detect Unsafe Ad Placements: 

• Identify and prevent ad placements on unsafe or irrelevant content across web and video advertising platforms.
• Use advanced AI, ML, and open-source intelligence (OSINT) technology to detect unsafe placements. 

Ensure Contextual Relevancy: 

• Ensure that ad placements are contextually relevant, targeting the right audience and boosting engagement.
• Enhance brand safety by avoiding associations with low-quality or inappropriate content. 

 Combat Brand Impersonation and Infringement: 

•  Detect and prevent brand impersonation via fake websites and social media handles. Protect against the misuse of brand logos and trademarks on counterfeit products.  
• Monitor and act against misleading or fake offers on messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. 
• 85% Takedown of infringement cases within 24-48%  

Affiliate Monitoring to Optimize Marketing Efforts 

 Prevent Affiliate Fraud: 

•  Monitor affiliate activities to detect and prevent fraudulent practices such as brand bidding, cookie stuffing, and click fraud. 
• Ensure that affiliates generate genuine traffic and conversions. 

 Optimize Affiliate Marketing Performance: 

• Track and analyze affiliate performance to ensure compliance with marketing guidelines.
• Identify top-performing affiliates and optimize commissions to encourage genuine sales and engagement. 

Conclusion 

Don’t let fraudsters ruin the festive season, optimize your marketing efforts and budgets to reap good results during the season and beyond. ad fraud detection, brand safety monitoring, and proactive brand protection are not seasonal activities, it’s the best practices that marketers need to adopt to build trust and transparency in the digital ecosystem. With mFilterIt you can verify, optimize, and protect your digital brands’ digital journey at every touchpoint, starting with ad traffic validation with integrated brand safety.