The sophistication of fraudulent activities and the inability of the entire media supply chain to eradicate such activities, are posing grave dangers to digital advertisers and brands.
With the advancement of digital media, criminals are now targeting big money. According to a report released by The&partnership, it was a shocker that up to 25% of all digital media spend is lost to fraud.
While ad fraud is highly troublesome for advertisers and brands, it is equally bad for the publishers. Bona-fide publishers invest huge amounts on creating a well-proofed and a differentiated content using additional resources, in order to monetize this content in a brilliant manner through semi-automated programmatic deals. Due to frauds, authentic publishers lose data credibility, the integrity of their brand and also face monetary losses.
This allows the fraudsters to leach off millions of dollars of advertiser’s money daily by compromising the digital identity and authenticity of data from legitimate publishers.
When a perpetrator fakes a domain, the market is hit with false metrics. This leads to a downfall of the publisher’s brand as advertisers and platforms see a mix of metrics that are inconsistent with the publisher’s inventory.
Eradicating such fraudsters is a humongous task which demands participation right from the agencies to networks, SSPs, exchanges, vendors right up to buyers and sellers. Apart from checking vendor seals, here are a few more things that publishers can do to prevent ad fraud…
To Monitor Sourced Traffic:
Publishers should be aware of their sources and must share this information with buyers and the exchanges. The genuine and premium publishers & SSPs are directly connected to the advertisers or DSPs by the programmatic tools, enabling advertisers to analyze their opportunities. Vertoz’s Ad Exchange hosts publishers as well as global advertisers on a single platform.
Protect Their Domain From Ad Injections and Content Scraping:
Ad injections take place when a third-party intervenes into the web content before it is rendered on the user’s browser. A fraudster would inject ads without the consent of the publisher and gets money out of it for unsanctioned impressions. Scraped content may not be of high priority, but it helps fraudsters to gain money with ads on a separate domain. It is very important to meticulously prevent web-scraping.
Allow Third-Party Traffic Assessment Tools:
When it comes to metrics like viewability, engagement, and bot detection, giving buyers the liberty to track their traffic through accredited third-party assessment and monitoring tools, is of high importance.
Vertoz is a proud member of The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), The Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG). The membership with these bodies signifies Vertoz’s commitment to fight fraud and other criminal activities that put a dent in the huge potential of digital advertising industry.
Work with IQG certified platforms:
TAG IQG is a set of guidelines that provide brand safety to marketers. An IQG-certified inventory will guarantee that the ads will not appear next to inappropriate content. Selling inventory via IQG certified networks and exchanges adds to the publisher’s authenticity. Vertoz has always placed top priority on high checks and standards for accountability and transparency.
Make Use of Targeting Strategy:
Vertoz Ad Exchange platform allows advertisers to use data science. This enables the advertisers to utilize advance targeting features to identify the preferred customer segments and realize their desired KPIs. In a bid to do away with reduce losses due to fake traffic, Vertoz’s platform allows frequency capping which essentially limits the number of times an ad is shown to a particular visitor.
Fraud is omnipresent. The industry has accepted it. But instead of ignorance, advertisers are now taking a dedicated stand against wasting their ad spend on crap. All in all, it is up to the ad tech industry to rebuild faith and make it safe for advertisers to buy media spaces. And as the industry copes with this it is the publishers who need to get hard on eradicating fraud from the individual supply chains.