There are three types of digital advertising fraud — traffic frauds boosting impressions or activity through bots, misrepresentation fraud where information is falsified by domain spoofing, ad injection and device hijacking and attribution fraud where a fraudulent party claims credit for conversions it did not influence.
Ad frauds are detected after the marketers undertake a review. Ad frauds can be identified in real time by deploying third party solution provider. There should be budgets for preventing ad fraud.
Online deception assumes many forms. There are fake likes and comments on advertising. Publishers and websites have an array of tools.
Click farming uses low paid workers to click banner ads. They create larger fan and follower communities in social media.
Bots are used to create false ad impressions on cost per impression campaigns. They carry out domain spoofing and copy reputed websites. They create ad inventory on these spoofy sites to gain advertiser’s attention.
Bad key word targeting is done by media companies who ask clients to bid for low value keywords to get cheaper clicks, when in reality they are actually getting irrelevant or fraudulent clicks.
Hidden ads is placing more than one ad in a designated high value slot so that every click or impression gets counted twice.
Ad injection happens on the media side where a bot or a programme is fraudulently placing ads on a site without permission.
The ultimate aim is to gain ad spends without having viewership. Marketing professionals in ad agencies and companies turn a blind eye towards false metrics.
There are companies which help prevent the fraud. But there are workarounds around these tools.
Bad ads have become a global problem. In 2018, Google identified and terminated one million bad advertising accounts. Nearly 7.3 lac publishers and app developers were terminated from Google ad network.
In digital media, there are increasing ad frauds. The needle is, however, shifting. The impact of ad frauds depends on how advertising reach is measured. All advertising cannot be measured the same way. Brand campaigns should be measured first on qualitative metrics, and then quantitative. However, while measuring ROI based on ad spends, first quantitative metrics are used, and then qualitative.
Ad frauds are rampant in banking and fintech, entertainment and gaming and healthcare and pharma. Here the focus is on new customer acquisition.
Those who generate fraudulent numbers could be blacklisted. It is necessary to stick to top platforms since they have safety checks.
Advertisers too want instant results, and are likely to be taken for a ride by organisations providing fraudulent impressions.
Impression (also called a view or ad view) refers to a point at which an ad is viewed once by a visitor or displayed once on a web page. The number of impressions of a particular ad is determined by the number of times the particular page is located and loaded. Smart advertisers are shifting from impressions served to impressions viewed.
Counting impressions without taking viewability into account is akin to the advertiser often paying for inventory which is not seen by real people. Viewable impressions are a superior metric.
Advertisers can use the tools to track metrics in real time.