By The constant changes in the world of digital advertising are leading to many challenges that are faced by both marketers and brands. There is a need to accurately measure the effectiveness of that ad campaign. The largest volume is often held by the top-of-the-funnel fraud which is Impression Fraud. It therefore becomes a marketer’s job to protect against these wastages and improve the ROI of campaigns. This can be achieved by adopting independent third-party validator tools driven by AI-ML tech.
Considering that Ad Fraud will cost marketers $172billion by 2028 (by Statista Research Department), tackling Impression fraud becomes crucial to safeguard advertising investments.
False Impressions or misleading ad impressions are generated by bots, and this happens when malicious impressions deceive the advertiser into thinking that genuine users have viewed their ads. This results in publishers trying to spike their ad revenues.
Importance of Post-Bid Impression Fraud Analysis
Impression Fraud analysis can be undertaken at both pre-bid and post-bid stages.
- In pre-bid analysis, i.e. before the ad is served, fraud can be identified based on only two parameters, IP and User Agents. Also, the time for analysis is limited to 10 milliseconds. As data shows, this results in a meager 2% fraud identification.
- This is where a post-bid analysis trumps a pre-bid impression validation. Now that we have several more parameters fraud detection is done on deterministic and heuristic measures as well. This results in the detection of higher invalid impressions of 12-20%.
This results in improved ROI on Ad spending. Doing post-bid analysis is a more beneficial method to detect ad fraud.
Level of Sophistication of Impression Fraud has Amplified
It is only through post-bid Impression Fraud Analysis that sophisticated frauds are uncovered. Some of the types of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic are:
- Advanced Persistent Bots (APBs): The largest number of impression frauds is caused by automated bots, which act like human beings when they go on to click on ads and impressions that pretend to look real towards ad platforms and analytics tools.
- Ad Stacking: This technique involves placing several ads on top of one another within a single ad slot. Every ad registers an impression even though only the uppermost one is visible. The result is that all the ads seem to have been viewed.
- Pixel Stuffing: Ads are stuffed into a small, generally invisible pixel on a webpage. Technically, it is considered the serving of an ad, but no real user sees it.
- Domain Spoofing: Fraudsters can make ads look as though they are being served on trustworthy websites, while in actual sense they come up on low-quality or even deceitful sites. As a result, this leads to fraudulent impressions as well as harming the brand’s reputation.
The Impact of Impression Fraud
Advertisers are impacted heavily by impression fraud. However, according to some estimates, advertisers lose approximately 15%, (Source: mFilterIt Reports) due to fraudulent impressions. Impression fraud also distorts performance metrics that advertisers need to evaluate the success of their campaigns accurately. This may lead to wrong choices concerning future marketing strategies and resource allocation.
Also, adverts show up on low-quality or irrelevant websites attributed to impression fraud which have brand safety implications.
How to Detect and Prevent Impression Fraud
Solving impression fraud requires an all-around approach that combines both proactive monitoring and advanced impression fraud detection technology. Following are some strategies that can be used:
- Use an Impression Fraud Monitoring Tool: Specialized tools designed to detect and prevent ad fraud are essential. These tools examine traffic patterns and detect inconsistencies, and suspicious activities in real-time. Ad verification services are used to ensure the right ad placements on trusted sites are displayed to actual users.
- Monitor Ad Traffic Sources: Keep an eye on the ad traffic sources regularly to identify possible fraud cases. Watch out for abnormal traffic surges. If some sources get poor engagement rates or exhibit high bounce rates, they might be contributing to impression fraud.
- Use Blacklisting: Automated tools integrated with ad managers help to blacklist for fraudulent placements. This enables the ads to run only on quality sites.
The Future of Impression Fraud
The sophistication of fraud tactics will also grow with the increase in digital advertising. Advertisers need to invest continuously in new technologies and methods of impression fraud detection to outsmart fraudsters. Their importance will grow as they get more sophisticated, playing an increasingly critical role in the security of online ad campaigns.
Conclusion
Impression Fraud is a dangerous issue that undermines the integrity of digital marketing. Nevertheless, advertisers who know how this kind of fraud works and have implemented sturdy impression fraud detection measures and monitoring tools can safeguard their investments and ensure that their adverts reach actual human viewership. In the fight against impression fraud, it is essential to remain informed and proactive so that your digital ad campaigns do not lose effectiveness or efficiency.
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