Eps 1: Adfraud in Display advertising
The effect of the traffic on impressions served carries forward to other metrics, including viewability, brand uplift and sales - metrics against which marketers themselves are likely to be evaluated.
Marketers have a thirst for mobile inventory, and although fraudsters cannot rely on prohibition-esque overlooking of their activities, they are likely to bet on a lack of diligence from some buyers.
Marketers can also protect themselves with an increased awareness of how and where their inventory is purchased.
Host
Melanie Wagner
Podcast Content
To find out why these so-called scammers are targeting your organisation, you need to look at the cold, hard facts. First of all, it's malicious and intentional activity that prevents your ads from reaching your target audience. It can be difficult to detect because there are so many different types of fraud and scams in the digital advertising world.
Fortunately, there are a number of companies that specialize in detecting ad fraud, most of which offer blacklist solutions to prevent fraudulent activity from affecting your future online advertising campaigns. Most often, these companies use algorithms to identify scams, scams and other types of display advertising fraud as well as other forms of advertising.
From there, certain URLs and IP addresses of ad fraud firms can be blacklisted. Social Puncher identifies these "secret URLs" and accesses them to check for fraudulent ads.
Unlike secret URLs, these programs try to avoid detection by using a network of different websites to ensure that no single property generates enough traffic to risk being caught cheating a brand. Pixalate researchers documented the same behavior on a number of websites protected by the fraud detection firm that investigated the sites at BuzzFeed News' request.
Multiple ads can be stacked on top of each other, so that only one is visible to the visitor. Some publishers even run ads on fraudulent websites and redirect advertising calls so that advertisers see legitimate websites, not illegal ones. Many sites in these programs would start and immediately gain traffic on the ads, then see their audience disappear months later.
There is a growing number of fraudsters - the companies that are developing innovative tools and practices to detect, prevent or, better still, eliminate digital ad fraud. There are scam methods used by scammers, but developers and publishers are pushing back.
Until recently, digital ad fraud was reluctantly accepted as an unfortunate expense for business. This was until fraudsters ramped up their game and began pulling billions of dollars out of the digital advertising ecosystem. And this year alone, it will cost publishers and advertisers billions, which is quite a chunk.
Today, digital marketers are stepping up their efforts to combat ad fraud with initiatives like ad-txts, but digital ad fraud is still worse than ever, as ad fraud syndicates are also innovative.
Earlier this year, we published a report in which we stated that we had uncovered a massive ad fraud in China, which caused billions of fraudulent ads per day and affected more than half of all ads purchased in the US and Canada. While ad platforms constantly sift through placement on low-quality sites, ad fraudsters also create fake content that aims to trick their algorithms. Fraudsters use tactics that cost brands billions of dollars and damage brand security by placing ads next to inappropriate content.
In our report, Adbug explained that an operation nicknamed "RedEye" generated fraudulent traffic using a combination of bots and human users. Bot detection tools can detect this type of fraudulent behavior, as ghost pages and redirected traffic fall into the same category as fake sites such as spam, fake news and fake ads.
Moneka Khurana said that the two biggest challenges for marketers in mobile advertising are the scam with mobile ads and the security of the brand. Mobile ad fraud has doubled in the past year, with 80 per cent of ad budgets diverted through ad fraud, according to mobile ad providers.
The latest figures show that the number of cases of digital ad fraud increased by more than 30 per cent in the first six months of 2019. A similar study by eMarketer said losses related to digital advertising fraud cost marketers $1.5 billion in 2018, up from $0.2 billion a year ago.
While digital marketers worldwide are taking major steps to detect and prevent ad fraud, there is still a lack of awareness, let alone other negative effects on businesses, of the major problem of mobile advertising fraud. By the simplest definition, fraud with mobile ads is the practice of deceiving companies . By absorbing and advertising budgets through systematic methodology and manipulation of user data.
The sheer size of the market entices criminals and hackers to develop technologies and techniques to steal money from advertisers. The sheer number of different mobile devices, from smartphones and tablets to tablets, can provide fraudsters with a wide range of illegal means of stealing money from businesses.
The phenomenon of ad fraud has existed since the early days of online advertising and has gained traction with the now widespread real-time bidding model . It is estimated that in 2015, fraudsters stole $5.8 billion from advertisers, although the actual figure could be much higher, as this type of fraud is very difficult to detect and the technology to protect advertisers is still incomplete. Given the sophistication of online advertising technology , the advertising and advertising industry, fraudsters have managed to steal this amount of money.