Ad fraud has become the most talked about thing in the digital ecosystem in the last one decade. Over the years it has become sophisticated and led to huge losses for the advertisers. According to the last measured stats, the potential loss due to ad fraud in 2024 will be around $100 billion.
And if marketers who are running impression campaigns are thinking that ad fraud is not impacting their ad campaigns, take a look at your campaign data.
If you see unusual traffic from sources outside your targeted area, there is one red flag for you to check. And like this, there are many more.
Impression validation is as crucial as validation of other hard key performance metrics. It helps advertisers get transparency at the beginning stage of the ad campaign and help them stop it at the root before it impacts the entire campaign, especially metrics like installs and events (like subscription, or first transaction) where the cost is higher.
Let’s understand in detail how impression fraud validation is essential for app marketers and how MMP’s are hiding the actual impact of fraudulent impressions.
MMP’s are hiding the full picture from you
Mobile Measurement platforms or MMPs often play a significant role in app marketing. They help the advertisers track the last click attribution of their ad campaigns and track app performance. There are a few MMPs who also provide ad fraud verification solutions bundled with their attribution services. However, ad verification by MMPs have their own limitations.
- Focus on Attribution, Not Validation: Their core services are limited to attribution and not validation. MMPs get paid on the number of attributions made and when they detect fraud on these attributed sources, it directly impacts their revenue creating a conflict of interest. Therefore, they detect only 10-12% of the fraud and the rest of the fraudulent traffic remains undetected.
- Limited Scope of Fraud detection: The MMP’s don’t have the capability of doing deeper checks. They can detect fraudulent traffic based on basic checks and they often miss sophisticated fraud techniques.
- Lack of Real-Time Fraud Insights: The attribution platforms cannot provide real-time fraud insights to advertisers. Their usual timeline for generating ad fraud reports is D+7, where if the fraud is detected by the 20th, the advertisers will receive the report by 28th of the month. This further delays the preventative measures which the advertiser could have taken against these fraudulent sources.
Why App Advertisers Need to Look for an Advanced Ad Fraud Solution?
In comparison to the fraud detection done by MMPs, mFilterIt’s Valid8 solution uses a more holistic approach against the sophisticated fraud techniques. Some of the differentiating factors which will help you realize the difference:
- Transparency on real % of fraud: When MMPs detect less % of ad fraud, the advertisers are not aware of the actual number of fraudulent traffic sources. This further impacts the efficiency of the ad campaigns, and the advertisers end up losing money twice. First, on the invalid traffic interacting with their ads before validation, and second when the actual number is not reported by MMPs. With mFilterIt, brands can transparency at the source-level and identify which traffic sources are skewing the metrics.
- Provides real-time analytics and blocking: Using mFilterIt’s ad fraud detection solution, the advertisers can get real-time analysis of the fraudulent traffic and block them in real-time. This helps advertisers to save money on both invalid traffic on ads and attribution cost for these traffic sources to MMPs.
- Give full funnel protection: Unlike the MMPs, our ad fraud verification tool protects the campaign holistically. Our full-funnel coverage not just validates traffic at impression-level, but also at the install and event level to reduce the impact of fraud. This ensures that cleaner traffic reaches the end-of-the-funnel, resulting in a better conversion rate.
A Real Case
Here is a real case of a brand which was running an install campaign. By partnering with mFilterIt the brand was able to identify the impact of invalid traffic at the impression level. Upon further analysis we found two specific reasons for invalid traffic – impression spamming and traffic coming from incorrect region. We identified the cause and started blocking invalid traffic which resulted in an increase in organic traffic at the install level.
Takeaway
Ad fraud is evolving, and it can easily bypass the basic checks by MMPs. For advanced fraud techniques, you need an advanced ad traffic validation solution in your tech stack. While looking for an ad fraud verification vendor for your app campaigns, don’t believe the surface level reports and checks. It is time to ask for transparency and ensure that your entire ad campaign is protected, thereby your ads are seen by a genuine audience resulting in better conversions.
To get details on how we do it, get in touch with our experts
