Early Signs of Ad Fraud

Knowing the early signs of ad fraud can help you mitigate its impact. While there is no consensus on how much advertisers lose each year to ad fraud, even conservative estimates suggest the figure could be in excess of $6 billion. By taking this step, ad fraud is clearly a costly problem. Unfortunately, the digital advertising industry and its associated laws have yet to successfully address this growing problem. But with just a few simple changes, you can start reducing the impact of fraud on your advertising budget. How to protect your business:

Demanding transparency from publishers

There are many reputable publishers that generate high-quality traffic. There are also sites notorious for increasing bot traffic, serving up stacked ads, or serving up other questionable content. Buying ads from these lower-quality sites is a complete waste of your advertising budget. However, because of programmatic advertising, many companies unknowingly buy ad space from them. Demanding transparency from your agencies and media partners is a crucial step in ascertaining the presence of ad fraud.

For example, the ability to directly access insights from performance data and interfaces from your media partners is a requirement that you should embed into any contract. Without this performance data, you have no idea where your ad spend is being allocated or where your ads are being seen.

Additionally, you must also reserve the right to access raw campaign data so that you have insight into what parameters the agency uses to calculate ROI, as well as being able to pinpoint any early signs of the presence of ad fraud. Your ad network or agency should have tools in place to protect your ads. If they don’t, consider working with an additional service to help you weed out campaigns that are wasting your money.

‍Measure your success

To measure your success and ensure that you’re making the most of your ad spend, you need to use the right tools. The first thing to look for is one that’s easy to use and accurate. You want a tool that delivers the data quickly and efficiently so there are no delays in getting it into actionable insights. It can also be helpful if it's affordable—and not only in terms of cost but also ease of access (so long as you don't have any security concerns).

Finally, make sure that whatever tool you choose offers something extra: flexibility and scalability are two crucial elements here. If your company grows over time or has multiple brands under its umbrella, then having a scalable solution in place makes sense; otherwise, there might be issues down the line when trying to get data across various platforms or teams without clunky workarounds.

Observe the site activities

A campaign’s effectiveness can be analyzed with the key metric being engagement. Ad Campaigns help in driving traffic to a page but any traffic without significant engagement is a sign of ad fraud. Monitoring solutions help advertisers analyze visitors’ engagement with content on a page, the time spent on the website, and other metrics which paints a better picture of the value being created by any campaign.

‍Your data reveals more than you might think. Ad fraud often leaves identifiable patterns that can be identified from periodic reports. Watch out for repetitive behavior, unusual results and everything else; it seems to come out. For example, if you see an influx of traffic at the same time every day without a corresponding increase in sales, you may have a bot hacking your site. These bots can deliver retargeting ads that quickly drain your retargeting budget by abusing every metric you have to determine which users are "high quality."

‍On the other hand, a huge increase in conversion rate for a single campaign might seem fine at first glance. However, coupled with the sharp increase in suspicious orders, this could indicate that the activity is driving bad traffic. This could mean the ad is being placed on a bad website or targeting the wrong people. Regular reports on these issues can help you find them faster.

Monitoring your brand reputation

‍Social media can be your friend for tracking ad placements. For example, attentive customers often complain on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or other social networks when they see branded ads on sites that contain controversial or adult content. This may indicate that your ad isn't appearing where it should be. There are also companies that track mentions of your business online to make sure you know where your content appears. It might not seem like a big deal to show ads on your website that could negatively impact your brand, but these days, poor placements can easily become viral threads that go everywhere for your customers. You can control how your business is described when something goes wrong by tracking your mentions.

Prevention is better than cure

Significant progress has been made in recent years, both in digital advertising capabilities and ad fraud protection, and innovation continues to evolve. Your business should be ready to take advantage of the latest technology. Make sure you have the right tools to accurately measure your ongoing campaigns, make changes when needed, and stay flexible. By using a variety of prevention techniques and digital advertising methods, you can prevent fraud from overly controlling your budget.

Tips for different strategies include:

- Use a variety of digital advertising methods, including sponsored social media posts, standard display ads, video ads on trusted sites, and programmatic retargeting ads. By spreading out your budget, you can prevent scammers from stealing too much information from a bad campaign.

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