There are many different ways to combat ad frauds. One of the most common is to use automated bots to identify fraudulent websites. Another way is to detect pixel stuffing. The latter involves using a program to identify fraudulent websites and then generating revenue by tricking the website owner into purchasing their ad space. While it may seem impossible to combat this, it is possible to detect pixel stuffing with automated bots.
Creating high-quality leads
While ad fraud is a growing concern for many marketers, it isn’t as difficult as you may think. The majority of fraudulent leads are low-quality and fake. Not only does this waste your sales department’s time, but it can also negatively affect your brand image. If you’re not careful, ad fraud can damage your reputation by posting fake ads on websites. Ads with low quality leads can also damage your ROI.
In the digital sphere, ad fraud is growing at an alarming rate. According to Juniper Research, advertisers are losing $51 million each day to ad fraud. In fact, ad fraud may hit $19 billion by the end of 2018 and the criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Recently, BuzzFeed found that YouTube and LinkedIn were being used to create fake pop-under ads and redirect traffic. Although the traffic numbers on BuzzFeed looked legitimate, the company was unable to verify the source of the fake leads. Fortunately, major advertisers are taking action to protect themselves and their brands.
Detecting ad fraud
Detecting advertising fraud is critical for the sake of brand safety and performance. Besides, it poisons other areas of optimization, including viewability and context. Luckily, it can be detected without the use of sophisticated tools. A little analysis and common sense will help you find out if your advertising campaign is actually fraudulent. Let’s look at some warning signs of ad fraud. The first one is that the campaign isn’t performing at all.
Another symptom of advertising fraud is the absence of traffic metrics. If your advertising partners are using nonhuman traffic metrics, they may not be able to detect fraudulent activity. In such a scenario, you may need to investigate the questionable websites. Even though this isn’t proof of advertising fraud, it might be useful to investigate and avoid paying for advertising on such websites. For this purpose, you will need to analyze traffic data from each of your vendors and find out if the traffic is real or not.
Detecting pixel stuffing
Detecting pixel stuffing in ads is a critical aspect of advertising fraud. It results in distorted data and, as a result, a high cost for legitimate conversions. Additionally, pixel stuffing can lead to the withdrawal of an ad campaign or the cancellation of the entire campaign if it is being used to generate fake impressions. In many cases, organizations end up losing money through pixel stuffing because their data becomes distorted, leading them to make decisions that are not based on data.
Detecting pixel stuffing in ads isn’t easy, as fraudsters can use several methods to do it. For example, they may use a fake website to generate impressions, but if the site doesn’t have any traffic, the perpetrators might stack several ads on top of one another and create a new ad on top of the original. In either case, the fraudster will make money by stacking several advertisements in an ad exchange.
Using automated bots
While platforms often tout a decline in online advertising fraud, this is largely because of bots. They’re cheap and easy to deploy on a massive scale, so the implications of bots for ad fraud go far beyond the bottom line of advertisers. As a prime example, bots have increased their activity during the US presidential election, and foreign activity groups have ramped up their efforts in this election year.
In order to counter this, companies are turning to technology solutions that filter out the traffic from automated bots. Bots mimic human traffic and trick ad companies into believing their ads are getting impressions from real people. Obviously, this type of traffic can’t contribute to the revenue of an ad company. The best way to prevent bot traffic from wasting your advertising budget is to stop the bots before they can damage your business.
Did you miss our previous article…
https://addisplaynetwork.com/online-advertising-strategies/advantages-of-programmatic-advertising-software/
