How To Spot Ad Fraud & Secure Your Adtech Platform

For those who are unfamiliar with adtech, it is a broad term that refers to the software and tools that agencies, brands, publishers, and platforms use to target, deliver, and measure their digital advertising efforts. Adtech software platforms help brands and agencies purchase advertising space from the app and website publishers who sell it.

Ad fraud is a complex challenge that all publishers face. Any attempt to defraud digital advertising networks for financial gain amounts to ad fraud. It is a serious problem for the adtech industry and legitimate publishers because it directly impacts their inventory value, ad revenue, and brand reputation. 

According to research by Business of Apps, publishers have lost $81 Bn to ad fraud in 2022 alone, and ad fraud losses are estimated to hit $100 Bn by 2023. In fact, fraudsters are finding new ways to scam advertisers out of their hard-earned money, as more investments are being made in digital advertising. 

To carry out ad fraud, scammers often use bots, but not always. There are a number of other methods that scammers can use to trick advertisers and ad networks into paying them by putting genuine publishers’ inventory at stake.  

How To Prevent Advertising Fraud?

Many companies have developed ad fraud prevention and detection techniques and tools in order to get rid of all these malicious schemes. These techniques can now be integrated into any kind of ad platform. 

Preventing ad fraud enables publishers to continue generating revenue while ensuring that their reputation is safe. Digital ad fraud steals revenue by reducing the value of ads and can lead to ad networks or demand-side platforms blocking your website. Publishers need to have robust ad fraud detection and prevention to protect their revenue, reputation, and business models.

The first step to mitigating ad fraud risk is to know your business partners. You should look for an ad network that has a transparent and strict platform, including fraud detection and prevention capabilities. 

Here are some steps to prevent ad fraud:

• Monitor traffic: You should have a baseline for what ‘normal’ traffic looks like. By monitoring traffic, you can identify abnormal activity like sudden traffic spikes, click-through rates (CTR) higher than the industry standard,  and outlier geographic regions. 
• Check conversion rates: Monitoring conversion rates can help you detect digital ad fraud. Low conversion during peak traffic may indicate a problem. If you’re working with a mobile app, a low to average click-to-install time (CTIT) could be a sign of install hijacking. On the other end of the spectrum, a very high CTIT might indicate click spam.
• Target audience precisely: The more precisely you target your audience, the faster you can detect abnormal activity. For example, if you know that you only want customers in Germany, you can more easily identify ad fraudsters trying to use a different geographic location. 
• Monitor competitors: To make sure that plagiarised content isn’t being used as part of digital ad fraud, you can set up alerts for exact matches. Sometimes, affiliates will compete on the same keywords, engaging in click fraud to drive business. In other cases, scraper bots will steal content so that the fraudsters can republish it on other sites.
• Collect data from end-user devices: Mobile ad fraud detection and prevention is different from desktop. To protect against things like SDK spoofing, you should be looking for client-side signals like events linked to touch events, typing speed, and sensor signals. 

In addition to the above-mentioned steps, you can also block risky IP addresses to prevent them from accessing your website in the future. 

Conclusion

As long as advertising space is plagued with bot traffic, ad click fraud, and fake views, ad fraud detection tools will not cease to develop. The variety of ad fraud schemes will only grow, considering the fact that the programmatic ecosystem actively expands to new environments (such as  OTT/CTV or audio) in the future. 

The sooner ad tech providers, publishers, and advertisers realise the real state of things, the better trading environment they will be able to create for their direct advertisers and publishers, besides generating higher incomes.

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