Ad fraud is a term that has shaken the entire digital advertising ecosystem over the last decade. Every year, fraudsters improve their ability to steal revenue from advertisers.
Cybercriminals threaten everyone, including advertisers, publishers, and ad networks. Fraudsters steal legitimate publishers' clicks. Meanwhile, ad networks' performance suffers as campaigns fail. The worst-case scenario involves advertisers paying for invalid users and organic downloads.
In this battle between fraudsters and the digital marketing ecosystem, myths cause advertisers to question ad fraud detection vendors, while fraudsters thrive on their money. Here's another myth that's been circulating lately.
In this blog, we are busting this myth with facts to help you understand the importance of ad fraud detection software.
What is cooking?
In digital advertising, publishers spread the word that ad fraud detection solutions prevent them from scaling an advertiser's business.
However, the reality differs.
Ad fraud detection solutions cause publishers to lose a significant portion of their revenue. For example, if an ad fraud prevention service provider detects 70% of fraud from a specific source, the publisher only receives a pay-out on 30% of the advertiser's genuine traffic.
Publishers & MMP union
Some well-known Mobile measurement platforms (MMPs) also provide ad fraud detection services alongside their attribution services. They claim to detect fraud in data attributed to them by an app advertiser and ensure clean traffic.
However, there's a catch.
The MMPs charge advertisers based on the number of attributions. As a result, if the MMPs detect additional fraud in the attributed data, they will lose revenue. As a result, to protect their income, MMPs detect 10-12% of fraud, while the remainder goes undetected.
This benefits MMPs and publishers by allowing them to claim higher pay-outs from advertisers. As MMPs detect low fraud, the publisher encourages agencies, advertisers, and other stakeholders to use MMP ad fraud detection, eventually benefiting them. This is similar to when the perpetrator instructs the victim to choose a location and file a complaint to ensure their safety. And while listening to this, advertisers fail to detect true fraud, resulting in significant revenue loss.
What do advertisers miss?
Real% of Fraud: Due to MMPs' limited fraud reporting, advertisers are unaware of fraud numbers. This hurts ad campaign performance, and advertisers lose money twice due to invalid traffic. First, they lose money due to invalid traffic before implementing an ad fraud solution. Later, they lose money on invalid traffic that the Ps fail to report.
Growth Opportunities: Advertisers use an MMP to measure campaign performance and collect analytical data. However, due to lower fraud reported by MMPs, marketers believe their campaign performance is good. Furthermore, as marketers base their decisions on skewed data, they invest more in the wrong campaign. This needs to improve the overall growth of the company.
mFilterIt versus MMPs.
Compared to MMPs' fraud detection, we provide advertisers with comprehensive ad fraud protection. Our ad traffic validation suite allows for the following:
Protection throughout the entire funnel
MMPs can detect general bots, but they frequently fail to detect the presence of sophisticated bots in an advertising campaign. Because sophisticated bots can easily mimic human behavior, they are challenging to detect and require advanced technology. With our full-funnel approach, we detect sophisticated bot patterns in real-time, allowing advertisers to take immediate action to mitigate their impact.
Detect new bots across domains.
A new bot emerges every day, making it difficult to detect across all platforms and domains. MMPs frequently require more time to respond to threats because their systems and policies are updated every six months or a year. When we detect a new bot on a campaign, we flag it across all advertisers/campaigns. This protects ad campaigns from the impact of the latest bot.
Proactive Reporting
The attribution platforms provide advertisers with late ad fraud reports. We provide double-protection basic and advanced. This includes pre-MMP checks (time-sensitive checks) and post-MMP checks (Advanced time insensitive checks). Pre-MMP checks include basic checks to prevent fraud clicks blocked before entering MMP. Minimum latency (~150ms) ensures that it does not interfere in integration and user experience Also capability to blacklist malicious sources, specific sub-publishers or traffic sources. Post-MMP checks include advanced pattern mapping checks that require grouping of data to map patterns.This works in tandem with pre-attribution checks to ensure overall traffic validation.
Forget the myth and believe in facts.
With the rapidly expanding world of digital advertising, fraudsters are making their every move brighter, more discrete, and invisible to the naked eye. Fighting fraudsters with an advanced ad traffic validation solution is critical to ensuring your marketing dollars are well spent.
A reliable ad fraud detection and prevention solution will detect fraud in real-time and provide comprehensive protection against sophisticated bots while not impeding your growth. The only party affected is the publisher, whose payout decreases when an effective ad fraud tool is implemented.
It's time to believe the facts, not the myths.
Get in touch with our experts for more information. Contact us to learn more.
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