Ad Fraud is a method, of fraudulently showing impressions, clicks, and actions to generate revenue by some fraud publishers. They use a variety of methods to cheat advertisers and ad networks to make money.
In early 2017, nearly 40% of the advertisements served by programmatic were fraudulent. The entire digital marketing industry concerned about this issue and worked hard to save advertisers money by identifying and eliminating such frauds. But the truth is, a 100% effective tool is not yet fully developed.
The amount spent on digital marketing is increasing every year due to the exponential growth of digital device usage. The digital advertising ad spend reaches nearly $521 billion by 2021 and it will be doubled in the next few years. This spend is nearly half of the global ad spend market. It will go further in the upcoming years. You know what, ad fraud is expected to hit $68 billion in 2022. All of them in the digital advertising field are trying to eliminate ad fraud. But, it’s not an easy process as everyone knows.
Other than Demand Side Platforms or Server Side Platforms, more third-party companies now joined together in programmatic advertising to save advertisers money. One report says, advertisers nearly spend 10 to 15 cents for every $1 to protect their impressions from ad fraud.
In this article, we are going to discuss,
What is Ad Fraud?
Types of Ad Frauds?
How to reduce Ad Fraud?
What is Ad Fraud?
Simply we can tell “Ad Fraud is a method of fraudulently showing impressions, clicks, and an actions to generate revenue by some fraud publishers.”
Various earning methods are available to the publishers. For example, some ad exchanges provide money based on impressions count, and some ad exchanges provide money based on click count. Google’s Adsense provides money based on the click count.
So, some fraudulent website or application owners intentionally create traffic to get more impressions, intentionally clicks the ad to get more clicks, and make more money from that fraudulent activities. In earlier days, a small group of people did this fraudulent activity and mostly they were from the same IP. So, identifying such fraudulent activities is easy at that time. But now most of the fraudulent groups use VPNs and large networks. So, differentiating them from the normal user is very difficult.
Types of Ad Frauds?
Bots
Bots are a small piece of program that repeatedly do the same kind of work. Here, bots are used to generate impressions and clicks like a real human. Previously, most of the small bots are doing repeated actions in the same way so it’s very easy to identify them. But, fraudsters are also improving their bots and they can rotate IP addresses and mimic the real human being. Such bot fraud activities are very difficult to identify.
These complicated bots can do such unimaginable jobs – Completing videos, Filling Forms, Add Items to the shopping carts, generate cookies and histories by automatically visiting sites.
Fraud Human Traffics
“Just work 2 hours daily from your home and earn Rs 15000/Rs 2000 per month” – I hope everyone saw this kind of advertisement on local buses and walls around bus stands etc. In this way, low-paid workers are employed by small groups and their job is to view advertisements/click advertisements/fill the forms, etc. They are real humans so it is very difficult to identify them.
Invisible or Hidden Ads
Publishers place more than one ad code back by back on the same ad slot. So when a user loads a web page all of the ad codes are loaded but the top ad is only seen by the user. In another method, publishers modify the ad’s pixel size to 1×1. So users are not able to see the advertisements but impressions are counted.
Domain Spoofing
Domain Spoofing is the method of selling ad inventory by falsely representing them as premium quality websites. For example, consider about.com is a premium website, and another website about.net is created by fraud persons, also they mimic the contents too. Advertisers think that this website is also a premium site actually not.
This method is not only used by any individual or small group. Even some fraud ad exchanges and ad networks are also using this method to satisfy their advertisers. For example, if any advertisers reach them to show a high amount of impressions on premium sports sites. At that time they are using this kind of domain spoofing site to satisfy their advertisers.
Zero Advertisements
Some company websites or government websites do not allow advertisements on their websites. If any user downloads or installs plugins or extensions which are created by the fraud activists by the way of this extension they inject advertisements on the ad blocked websites.
How to reduce Ad Fraud?
Ad Frauds can not be eliminated completely but they can be reduced.
Currently, most of the demand side platforms/server side platforms give solutions to reduce Ad Fraud. For example, If Adsense sees a high click rate from a particular publisher (Website/App) they are blocked by Adsense. So advertisers should partner with the platform that successfully works against ad fraud.
Advertisers should monitor their campaign performance. If they are seeing any abnormal activities such as high click rate, high action rate, etc then they should focus on it.
Advertisers can continuously monitor and block the fraudulent IP, Site Lists.
Advertisers can check themself “Zero Ad Websites” with the Ads.txt file. To create transparency in buying inventory IAB introduced the Authorized Digital Sellers or ads.txt method. In this method, publishers need to create ads.txt file on their host. Within this notepad file, they need to declare all of the ssp details they partnered with to show advertisements.
So advertisers can easily know where the premium websites are partnered to show advertisements.
Ads.txt file contains information as below,
google.com, pub-5150158695507376, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0
