Digital Ad Fraud:
Digital ad fraud refers to the act of misrepresenting or purposely tampering with engagement metrics, drawing fraudulent traffic and impressions, affecting the click-through rates and revenue generation.
With programmatic advertising serving as a helpful tool for advertisers and publishers to get involved in the automated marketing of the new digital era, ad fraud is almost inevitable, with professionals of all sizes being at risk of running into bad actors one way or another.
To put it in the most simple terms, ad fraud is when adverts are paid for and published on fraudulent sites, or when impressions, clicks and installs are faked in efforts to exploit the mobile advertising technology system to generate fraudulent revenue.
Types of Mobile/Online Ad Fraud:
It can be difficult to accurately categorize the types of ad frauds to detect and monitor them on an individual level, as they can often blend in with one another. Nonetheless, we have put together a list of the common fraudulent acts that typically take place in the digital advertising sphere.
Click fraud is one of the most common kinds of ad fraud and is usually committed by bad bots. The act describes bots that exploit pay-per-click (PPC) ads by spending the advertiser’s entire budget and generating false traffic by running click farms.
Similarly, click injection refers to the simulation of high clicks as well, but with app installs. In this case, a fraudster will create fake clicks when app installs are taking place, claiming the attribution for these installs.
The ad stacking concept takes place in programmatic ad placements, where ad units are stacked on top of each other, as the name suggests. A publisher sells multiple ads on a platform, placing one on top of the other, causing each of them to gain more impressions.
Another type of ad fraud that exploits the advertising platform is ad injection, where fraudsters take advantage of compromised browser extensions, plugins and other malware to place ads where they aren’t meant to be displayed, or to replace existing ads placed initially by a legitimate publisher.
Domain spoofing involves the act of posing as a legitimate and reputable domain. Advertisers are then tricked into paying premium prices to secure fake ad placements, in the belief that the website is valuable.
SDK spoofing is a type of ad fraud that entails creating a bot within an app, which then sends illegitimate clicks and installs using data from real devices, without there being any actual installs.
Also known as geo masking, the concept maximizes traffic that is more valuable in other regions or countries by fraudsters disguising themselves as being from a particular location.
Bot traffic describes invalid traffic that does not qualify as legitimate ad traffic and, therefore, cannot be considered a valid metric when measuring KPIs. Ad traffic is considered invalid traffic when it is non-human traffic, such as spiders or bots, or suspicious activity that generates malicious traffic.
Ad Fraud Prevention Techniques:
The most common aspect of ad fraud you want to focus on is preventing fake traffic from being associated with your paid channels and making sure that your ad spend is generating revenue to the correct channels and accelerating user engagement. Another important tool is keeping your database clean and updated so that you can rest assured your campaigns are being carried out and analyzed based on correct and real data.
Apart from keeping a close eye on your data and making sure you track every single traffic event, whilst maintaining clean records, you also want to choose the right ad network, which you can trust.
It is also beneficial to have an ads.text file in place to accurately identify which ad networks, ad exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs) are being used by web pages that resell your inventory.
Partnering with our top ad fraud detection companies will help you accurately detect automated bots and fraudulent activities in your campaigns.
As the realm of mobile ad fraud is extremely complex, it requires a high level of specialization and expertise. There are several ad fraud detection platforms out there that focus on the buying and selling of ad placements.
List of Ad Fraud Detection Companies
ADEX
ADEX shows you a real-time quality report identifying invalid traffic, fraud, and bots that drain your online advertising budget. Slice and dice reports with traffic source, campaign, and any combination of custom parameters you are using to obtain a clear picture of your advertising traffic quality.
Learn more – https://adex.com/
Anura
Anura is an ad fraud solution that accurately identifies bots, malware, and human fraud. Anura’s solution mitigates ad fraud allowing advertisers to invest more resources towards growing their business, eliminating false positives by only marking visitors as fraudulent when it is 100% confident the visitor isn’t real.
Key features
- Increase campaign performance
- Reduce chargebacks
- Reduce wasted ad spend
Learn more – https://www.anura.io/
AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer applies multi-layered approach to protect mobile advertising campaigns from fraud. The layers include install authentication, clustering-based anomaly detection, validation rules, attribution calibrator and post-attribution. Its solution is capable to prevent Install Hijacking, Click Flowing, Device Farms, Bots, Fraudulent in-app events and Fake Purchases.
- Type: App advertising analytics, Marketing analytics
- Pricing: 30-day trial period with Basic plan, the Custom plan price is available upon request
- Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows & Xbox, Amazon, tvOS, Unity, Cordova, Marmalade, Cocos2ds, Adobe Air, React Native.
Learn more – https://www.appsflyer.com/
mFilterIt
mFilterIt is a pioneer in app fraud detection and prevention. Trusted by globally accredited marketers, their solutions are powered by the capabilities of AI, ML, and data science. To bring transparency and trust to digital advertising, they provide log-level data on fraud for DV360/ programmatic campaigns, affiliate campaigns etc. Their full-funnel approach and real-time data, enable the brands to make better business decisions and protect their ad spends from further wastage.
- Tagline: Eliminate invalid traffic from your app campaigns running on biddable and non-biddable platforms for both performance and brand campaigns
- Services: Ad Fraud Prevention, Ad Fraud Elimination, eCommerce Competitive Analysis.
Learn more – https://www.mfilterit.com/ad-fraud-solution
Fraud Blocker
Fraud Blocker is a leading ad fraud protection software that improves advertising performance by automatically blocking ad traffic from bots, click farms and other malicious sources. Approximately $65 billion is lost to ad fraud each year.
Learn more – https://fraudblocker.com/
FraudScore
FraudScore is an independent antifraud solution that evaluates the quality of mobile and web traffic in advertising campaigns. FraudScore clients are direct advertisers and ad agencies, ad networks & mobile developers from all over the world. FraudScore offers antifraud solutions for all steps of ad campaign funnel: from DSPs, to CPI, CPM, CPA and CPC. FraudScore is well known to be effective in combat against click spamming, bot, malware and adware, click injection, bot farms and many more.
Learn more – https://fraudscore.ai/
Virus Positive Technologies
The world’s biggest brands rely on Virus Positive Technologies brand protection solutions to eliminate invasive promotions, protect their online customer journey, and consistently recover advertising revenue.
Learn more – https://viruspositive.com/
TrafficGuard
TrafficGuard detects, mitigates and reports on digital ad fraud before it hits your advertising budget. Sitting within the advertising journey, TrafficGuard analyses impressions, clicks, conversions and events to mitigate ad fraud at its earliest reliable detection. Our proactive approach keeps your performance data clean, and helps you scale and optimise your advertising confidently.
Learn more – https://www.trafficguard.ai/
Machine Advertising
Machine Advertising helps marketers to stop paying for fraudulent app installs. In 2018, Machine has analysed over 22.4m app installs. 56% of the installs we detected as fraudulent. On average, this saved our clients 46% of their app marketing budgets from being wasted on worthless app installs. Machine’s cost averages 4.5% of app marketing budgets.
Learn more – https://www.machineadvertising.com/
PPC Protect/Lunio
PPC Protect is the leading click fraud detection software for your PPC campaigns, offering automated protection in 3 clicks giving you more leads, while saving you money. With millions of Ad clicks analyzed in real-time, our system detects and blocks unwanted clicks with unprecedented accuracy, ensuring you only receive legitimate visits to your ads.
Key features:
- PPC Protect’s automated click fraud protection software helps to protect online marketers running PPC campaigns of any size
- Installed on websites by copy and paste, the cloud-hosted SaaS features automatic, real time IP blocking that determines when, where and how a fraudulent click occurs
- Full traffic monitoring capabilities go beyond logging clicks of pay-per-click (PPC) adverts, to also analyze website visitors and building a more detailed profile that identifies fraudulent behavior before it occurs
- Web-based account access allows for multiple users and role-based permissions, while PPC Protect’s centralized admin dashboard enables multiple domains to be added and managed from one location all for no extra cost
- Our proprietary self-learning AI algorithm allows us to detect click fraud with unprecedented accuracy.
Learn more – https://lunio.ai/
Branch Metrics
Branch Metrics offers sophisticated ad fraud protection solution. It features comprehensive reports on suspicious activity, industry-standard blocking rules and AI-based fraud detection algorithms. It’s focused on using Branch personas data from its vast, global identity network and doesn’t rely on inferior Fingerprinting tech.
- Type: App marketing analytics, Advertising analytics
- Pricing: 3 plans – Free, Startup (depending on a traffic volume either $59 or $200 / month), Enterprise
- Demo: available.
Learn more – https://www.branch.io/
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