MFA or Made For Advertising sites are growing faster. Made For Advertising sites are built with the purpose of making money from programmatic advertising. As per the Association Of National Advertisers, around 21% of ad spend accounts for MFA sites. It’s not easy to differentiate MFA sites and legitimate sites.
IAS or Integral Ad Science is a leading ad measurement company that works to address ad fraud, viewability, etc. Now, IAS come up with a solution for identifying and avoiding MFA sites in a programmatic advertising environment.
What Are MFA Sites?
MFA stands for Made For Advertising Sites. MFA sites are created only for the purpose of making more money from digital advertising. They create MFA sites with good content, clickbait headlines, multiple ad spaces, etc to gain more traffic.
A group of interlinked networks plays around MFA sites. Their goal is to increase the website traffic and maximize the ad impressions to get more money from advertising. These MFA site builders are very well-known for the technologies around search engine optimization, website design, and ad placement techniques.
- MFA Sites account for 21% of ad impressions.
- 26% of ads spent on MFA sites are waste.
A few Examples For Made For Advertising Sites
Below are a few example sites for MFA. If you open these sites, a large number of ad slots will be there. Mostly, these ad slots are not visible to the human eye. If you use an ad blocker, you can identify the ad slot count under each page.
| 247mirror.com | ballercap.com | cashsatr.com |
| abest-tech.com | chocolate.com | likesharetweet.com |
| affluentbeat.com | bigkath.com | luxandlush.com |
| affluentexpress.com | curiositywell.com | madeinhistory.com |
| affluentmirror.com | brain-sharper.com | madhistory.com |
For example, I have checked the ad slot under the “heraldweekly.com” website, under one page around 40 ad slots open. I waited for a few seconds and the blocked ad count increased continuously. This is how they fetch and show more ads on their website for each page load.
Screen 1 :
Screen 2 : Few Seconds Later
What Are The Difficulties To Identify The Money For Advertising Sites?
MFA sites have good content, website design, and clickbait headlines that mimic the footprint of many legitimate websites. So, we can’t differentiate the MFA websites at first sight.
As digital marketers, we see the websites where our ads are delivered to optimize our campaigns. We are very well-known about a few premium websites and not aware of other websites. So, we basically check the content available on the home page, website design, and the UI. If everything looks fine then we consider them as legitimate sites and continue to deliver our ads.
In programmatic advertising, most ad campaigns are running with a “brand awareness goal”. For a brand awareness campaign, ad viewability is the crucial metric to understand the effectiveness of a campaign. As per the Ebiquity analysis, the Made For Advertising sites have a viewabilty rate of 77%. That is more than the average marketing viewability standard.
A well-known professional created the Made For Advertising sites only to make more money from the advertising. So, they followed many tricks and showed them as legitimate. That’s why it is very difficult to identify them in a manual way.
You can use the below ways to identify the MFA websites,
- Their intention is to show maximum ads. So, many ads slot placed around the content which disturbs the users from reading content.
- Many types of intrusive ad slots are present on the site which increase the click chance.
- The content copied from other legitimate websites, poorly written content, and clickbait headlines are the sign for MFA sites.
We need to spend a lot of time to identify the Made For Advertising sites. Also, they frequently changed their domain names to run this business. That is why this is very difficult to identify the MFA sites.
IAS New AI Driven Tech Would Be The Solution
A well-known ad measurement company called IAS or Integral Ad Science came up with a New AI-Driven Technology to solve the MFA sites problem. As per the IAS announcement, using their new AI technology advertisers can control the money allocation on MFA sites. During the testing, this technology gave good results.
This IAS new AI-driven technology considers the metrics below to classify the MFA sites.
- Content – Ad – Ratio
- Refresh Rate
- Source Of The Traffic
As I said before, the MFA sites have more ad slots than the content. Also, they refresh continuously to display more ads in a short period. The MFA site networks have a large network to generate traffic for the MFA sites. Mostly, their traffic source could be the same most of the time.
IAS uses AI technology to analyze these data to identify the MFA sites. Also, IAS trains its AI technology to improve its capability. When more inputs are injected into this AI technology its capability will be improved a lot.
Conclusion
As per the data from various platform sources, around 21% of ad spend accounts for MFA sites. That means billions of ad spend wasted for the advertisers. Previously, there was no technology available in the ad industry to identify the MFA sites. Now, the ad measurement legend IAS launched a solution “Made For Advertising (MFA) AI-driven site detection and avoidance technology”. Hope this technology will help the advertisers to reduce the money wastage on MFA sites.
If you are an advertiser or campaign manager, contact your demand-side platform support to check out the IAS new feature to detect the MFA sites. If it is available then start using this technology to save your ad spend.
