As mobile app ads have become more pervasive, advertisers are facing growing concerns around app installation fraud and the complexity of detecting fraudulent activity, especially in markets like the USA, where the stakes are high. The U.S. market mobile ad fraud, with estimated losses of around $1.2 billion. The focus is on safeguarding the organic traffic stolen, preventing APK fraud and referral fraud along with full-stack fraud prevention that can help optimize ad campaigns and build trust and transparency across the digital advertising ecosystem.
Let’s dive deeper the unveil the various aspects of mobile ad fraud and how to combat them.
Challenges of Mobile Ad Fraud in the USA
The mobile app ecosystem is growing and evolving and expanding across the global especially in the BFSI industries, the rise of Fintech apps and lending apps has also raised the stake of fraud prevention in app ecosystem. Most app fraud prevention apps don’t cover the sophisticated and dynamic nature of ad frauds that lead to fake installs and thereby low return on investment.
Here are some of the major challenges:
- Organic hijacking via Click Spam: Theft of organic traffic is one of the biggest hurdles in mobile app advertising. Deceptive techniques to mimic legitimate installs and generate traffic that appears organic, resulting in inflated numbers that distort performance metrics. It leads to skewed insights for advertisers who rely on authentic user data and affects the return on investment (ROI).
- Click Fraud: Validating traffic with comprehensive click fraud prevention is a must for advertisers to excel in the competitive landscape and ensure that budget is spent on valid clicks only. The deterministic, heuristic and behavioral checks with google approved mFilterIt click tracker can help combat fraud like no other.
- APK installs: Fraudulent mobile app ads are created to mislead users into downloading fake apps or counterfeit APK files. This compromises devices or artificially boosts install metrics. Detecting APK fraud is essential for ensuring that advertising budget is spent effectively and that users are protected from malicious content and bring true performance to their campaigns.
- Referral fraud: Fake referrals or incentivized clicks driving traffic inflate numbers that affect campaign efficiency. Fraudulent end users use the coupons codes multiple times either by cloning the app or by using VPN/Proxies etc. creating multiple device environments in the same device.
By exploiting referral programs, fraudsters generate fake installs and impressions, tricking advertisers into paying for traffic that doesn’t convert. Implementing mobile ad fraud detection systems can protect advertisers who rely on mobile app ads to drive real user engagement.
How can advertisers combat mobile ad fraud?
Make Payout for validated traffic and work with Trusted Publishers
Validate traffic and pay for only genuine engagement. Identify the publishers the bring in influx of invalid or fraudulent traffic to your campaign and work with only trusted published to protect integrity of your ad campaign.
Encourage Good practice by Ad Networks to give a ‘Certificate of Validity’
Ad traffic validation could also support ad networks to authenticate and validate based on the performance to safeguard the interest of advertiser and builds clean and transparent digital advertising ecosystem.
Ask MMPs the right questions
Do not trust the MMPs blindly, a third-party validation removes the suspicion around traffic validation as fraudsters bypass MMP fraud detection. Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) have become pivotal for marketers and businesses, especially in tracking app installs, user engagement, and campaign performance. However, recent developments highlight the limitations of solely depending on MMPs for ad fraud detection.
How deploying independent Third-Party validators build transparency?
The most effective way for advertisers to combat mobile ad fraud is by using independent third-party validators—an unbiased, external layer of protection. Validate the fake traffic and interactions associated with an ad campaign. mFilterIt offers a comprehensive ad fraud detection system powered by advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. It can identify suspicious patterns with deterministic, heuristic, and behavioral checks.
It enables advertisers to identify and block fraudulent activities before they drain their budgets and ensure that only genuine traffic is counted, reducing the risk of fraudulent interactions, like click fraud, bots, and fake impressions. As an essential step in the fight against ad fraud and invalid traffic, it is important to validate before advertisers, ad networks and agencies collaborate with publishers.
Monitor and verify each install or click with Mobile ad fraud detection solutions. It helps in identifying APK fraud, referral fraud, and protects organic traffic from being stolen. Proactive fraud prevention using data-driven strategies preserves the integrity of mobile advertising campaigns and ensures it delivers true value.
- Impression Integrity: Start with checking up impression integrity with Impressions validation, ad visibility and post-bid validation.
- Click Integrity: Weed out invalid or fraudulent traffic and bots with click fraud prevention.
- Install Validation: Check if the installs are by genuine customers or bots also follows up tracking soft KPIs and events triggered such as registration, logins or signups.
- Re-engagement & Post-back Blocking: Hard KPIs such purchases, deposits, and transactions also need to be validated for efficient re-engagement and post-back blocking.
Advertisers and developers need to adopt robust fraud detection systems with advanced algorithms and machine learning tools to identify suspicious patterns and block fraudulent activities. As an essential step in the fight against fraud, validate before collaborating. Trusted ad networks and ensured transparency in mobile ad transactions.
Here are some benefits of proactive mobile app fraud prevention:
- Weed out fraud to improve ad campaign efficiencies
- Enabling brands to take better-quality business decisions
- Show funnel visibility & transparency basis performance
- Optimizing the publisher ecosystem
Case Study: How FinTech App identified high volume of Fake Installs
Problem Statement
Fake app installs were significantly inflating the user acquisition costs and reducing the efficiency of marketing campaigns. They needed to identify sources of such fake installs and block them. High volume of fake install adversely affects the overall return on investment (ROI).
The Challenges
- Inability to accurately measure genuine user engagement and conversion rates.
- Due to a lack of robust fraud detection mechanisms, the app is unable to identify and mitigate the impact of these fraudulent activities, resulting in wasted advertising budgets.
FinTech app with mFIlterIt
Our app fraud prevention solution Valid8 detected approx. 59% fraud count among the total installs over the course of 3 months.
Fig. 1: Among total Fraud counts – Distribution based on sources across publishers.
Impact of Fraud detection by mFilterIt Valid8
- More events coming out of installations tagged under Click Spam and Fake Attribution indicate hijacking of organic / other paid sources’ traffic by affiliates.
- Conversion ratio from Fake Device is extremely low which means that whatever being tagged as fake install is not resulting into anything.
Approximately $1.8 million are saved across 3 months!
Conclusion
The menace of mobile app fraud is running rampant as more businesses lose out on massive amounts of money on fake numbers. To combat app fraud advertisers, need full-funnel protection to optimize performance in the mobile ecosystem. Check every click, event and install make sure you pay for only genuine installs and app activity.
Our mobile app fraud prevention tool, mFilterIt Valid8, protects your endeavors in the digital ecosystem along with integrated brand safety. It weeds out fraud to improve ad campaign efficiencies, enabling brands to take better-quality business decisions, show funnel visibility & transparency basis performance and optimizes the publisher ecosystem.
Get in touch to know more about ad fraud prevention tool.
