Sender can now verify beneficiary before paying through RTGS, NEET: RBI
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Safeguard Your Programmatic Ad Campaigns from Fraud
To stay on top of your digital marketing game, safeguarding your programmatic ad campaigns from fraud is paramount. Ad fraud can drain your budget, distort your performance metrics, and threaten your brand’s reputation. Protects Your Digital Ad Campaigns Advertisers need comprehensive protection against fraudulent activities. Here’s how it ensures the integrity and effectiveness of your programmatic advertising: Identification and Filtering of Invalid Traffic Meticulously analyzes traffic to identify and filter out invalid clicks and bot activities. This ensures that your ads are seen by real people, enhancing engagement and conversion rates. Automated Blacklisting By automating the blacklisting of suspicious traffic sources, continuously cleanses your traffic, prevent fraudulent sources from inflating your ad spend. Enhanced Transparency Accuracy in measurement and weeding out invalid or fraudulent traffic build trust and transparency allowing for more informed decision-making and improved ROI on ad spends. Fortunately, mFilterIt offer robust protection, ensuring that your ads reach real, relevant audiences and deliver genuine engagement. Case Study: mFilterIt’s Impact on Search Campaigns A global automobile company faced a significant challenge with low conversion rates and engagement despite substantial spending on Google search campaigns. Here’s how mFilterIt turned the situation around: Ad Traffic Validation mFilterIt started by validating the incoming traffic to ensure that only genuine, interested users were engaging with the ads. Blacklisting Traffic Anomalies Anomalous traffic patterns were identified and blacklisted, cutting off fraudulent sources. These actions led to a remarkable improvement in a short period. Let’s look at the numbers: By The Numbers: Client Success with mFilterIt 13% Drop in Click Fraud: By filtering out invalid clicks, the company saw a significant reduction in click fraud, ensuring their budget was spent on real potential customers. 11% Drop in Lead Fraud: With improved traffic validation, the quality of leads improved, resulting in a noticeable drop in lead fraud. $1.2 Million Saved Due to Active Blacklisting: The automated blacklisting process saved the company a substantial amount in ad spend that would have otherwise been wasted on fraudulent activities. mFilterIt Impact: 1.75X Increase in Conversion Ratio The most compelling outcome was the dramatic increase in the conversion ratio. By ensuring that ads were only seen by genuine users, the company experienced an improvement in their conversion rates. This not only validated their investment in mFilterIt but also demonstrated the power of effective ad fraud prevention. Conclusion Ad fraud is a significant threat to digital marketers, but with the right tools, it can be effectively managed and mitigated. mFilterIt provides the necessary protection to ensure your programmatic ad campaigns are reaching the right audiences, optimizing your ad spend, and ultimately driving better business results. Protect your digital ad campaigns with mFilterIt and witness the difference in performance and ROI Download Submit
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The Truth About Online Advertising: Is a Genuine Audience Viewing Your Ad?
Every click and impression matters, but not all views are created equal. While marketers strive for high engagement rates and impressive reach, a significant portion of ad traffic is generated from invalid sources. Invalid impressions not only waste advertisers’ budgets but also undermine the credibility of digital marketing campaigns. When marketers are paying for impressions that are not being seen by real people, their ROI suffers. How do fraudsters generate invalid or fake impressions? Inflated numbers from invalid sources often fail to lead to conversions or milestone achievements. Invalid clicks and impressions are major concerns, as they undermine the effectiveness of ads and result in wasted media spend. Here are key sources that generate invalid impressions: Domain Spoofing: Fraudsters fake premium site placements, making it appear as though your ad is on a high-quality site when it isn’t. Pixel Stuffing: Invisible ads are falsely counted as viewed, misleading you into thinking your ad has been seen. Cookie Stuffing: Unauthorized cookies inflate engagement metrics, making it look like there’s more interaction with your ad than there actually is. Ad Stacking: Layered ads cause inflated impression counts, as multiple ads are stacked on top of each other in a single ad placement. Proxy Traffic From non-targeted Location: Fake impressions generated from manipulated locations further distort your campaign metrics. MFA (Made-for-Advertising) Sites: These sites are created specifically to serve ads but lack real user engagement, leading to low-quality impressions. Low-Quality Content Sites: Ads placed on sites with poor content relevance are less effective and often ignored by users. Frequency Capping Violations: Overexposure of ads on the same device diminishes their impact, as users become desensitized to repeated ads. mFilterIt: Ensuring Brand Safety, Ad-Fraud Prevention, and Viewability At mFilterIt, we specialize in B.A.V (Brand Safety, Ad-Fraud Prevention, and Viewability). We work tirelessly to eliminate Invalid Traffic (IVT), ensuring that your media spend goes towards legitimate impressions and optimized campaign KPIs. Up to 30% in ad spend saved by identifying and blocking sources of invalid impressions ~25% post-ad ecosystem cleanup average ROI improvement 27% MFA sites Ensure your ads reach a genuine audience is crucial for achieving meaningful engagement and maximizing your advertising budget. Trust mFilterIt to safeguard your ad campaigns against fraud and optimize your ad spend for better performance and higher returns. Download Submit
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Is your CTV Ads Budget ROI Optimized with Ad Fraud Detection?
Connected TV (CTV) ads have emerged as a powerful digital advertising medium for brands looking to engage in a more targeted and interactive manner. As CTV viewing time has doubled over the last four years, CTV ad spending is also projected to reach $27.47 billion. Some of the popular CTV platforms for advertising are Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, etc. The radical shift in viewership from traditional TV to streaming TV has opened this great opportunity. However, the opportunity is coupled with threats and challenges to ensure the integrity of ad traffic. Advertisers spending on CTV ads risk wasting precious ad budgets on illegitimate views and impressions, ultimately diminishing their return on investment (ROI). According to a recent study, in the second quarter of 2024, 19.4% of programmatic ad traffic to CTVs was invalid worldwide. To protect CTV ad campaigns, automation with advanced processes and AI ML-powered solutions is necessary. Let’s dwell deeper and explore why validating ad traffic is essential for CTV campaigns and how it can significantly enhance your advertising effectiveness and profitability. What is CTV ad fraud? Approximately, $1.14 billion in global CTV open programmatic ad spend was lost to invalid traffic in Q2 2024. This highlights the gravity of ad fraud in the CTV ecosystem. CTV ad fraud causes inflation in ad campaign metrics of CTV ads due to invalid traffic, bot-driven engagement, and app spoofing. Some of the most common CTV ad fraud include: Invalid or Bot Traffic: That does not come from a genuine user, including traffic generated by data centers (DCH), automated clicks, and other non-human sources. Bots generate fake ad views or clicks, making it appear as though there is legitimate engagement from real users. Device Spoofing via: Creating fake CTV devices or apps to mimic real ones. It often tricks advertisers into buying ads on non-existent or fraudulent platforms. VPN/DCH: Traffic coming from Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or data centers, is often used to hide the true location of the user and generate fake engagement from non-targeted regions. CTV ad fraud also includes device spoofing, running ads through secondary devices while the TV is off, and invalid server-side ad insertion (SSAI). Campaign Optimization for Frequency Cap Violations: Improve performance while preventing frequency capping violations, which occur when an ad is shown to the same user too often. By monitoring and managing frequency, advertisers can enhance engagement and reduce ad fatigue, ultimately maximizing return on investment (ROI). Viewability Attention Metrics: The issues occur when advertisements are assessed for their visibility without adequately measuring user engagement. This leads to a mismatch between the visibility of ads and genuine interactions, resulting in distorted performance metrics. Impact of CTV Traffic Fraud Addressing CTV ad traffic fraud is essential to protect advertising investments and ensure accurate performance measurement. Implementing advanced fraud detection solution can mitigate these impacts, leading to more effective and efficient CTV advertising campaigns. Wasted Ad Spend: A significant portion of the advertising budget is lost to fraudulent traffic. CTV fraud detection and ad Traffic validation can identify any ineffective allocation of marketing resources. Distorted Performance Metrics: Inaccurate data on ad impressions and engagement due to skewed metrics leading to misguided strategic decisions. Reduced ROI: Lower return on investment due to non-human interactions or invalid traffic, which makes it difficult to achieve campaign objectives. Damage to Brand Reputation: Ads potentially appearing in inappropriate or non-existent placements lead to a loss of consumer trust and brand credibility. Inaccurate Audience Targeting: Ineffective targeting and personalization efforts due to misleading information about audience demographics and behavior. Compromised Strategic Planning: Inability to accurately measure campaign success and challenges in optimizing future campaigns based on flawed data. Competitive Disadvantage: Brands without robust fraud detection may fall behind competitors and reduce the effectiveness of marketing strategies compared to competitors using advanced fraud prevention. Case Study Improving CTV Ad Campaign Performance for a Global Energy Player A leading global player in the energy sector was running CTV audio and display campaigns on Roku TV to boost visibility and audience reach. Challenge: Despite substantial digital spending, the brand was experiencing low reach and engagement metrics (impression & viewability, completion rate, VTRs, reach and frequency metrics) which did not align with its investment. The primary challenge was the discrepancy between the digital spending and the actual reach and engagement metrics. The brand suspected that a significant portion of their ad traffic might be fraudulent, negatively impacting their campaign performance and ROI. Solution: mFilterIt was brought in to validate the traffic for the CTV campaigns, ensuring that the brand’s ads were only shown to legitimate viewers. The process involved identifying B.A.V (Brand Safety, Ad Fraud & Viewability) & F-Cap over-exposure prevention to ensure the impression gets served within the frequency defined by the advertiser, brand safe, and non-IVT only. Results: The mFilterIt analysis for the video campaign showed, that the average fraud was around 16% invalid traffic including 6.11% from invalid geographies, and the rest was from repeated IP bots, device repetition, and low-intent users. Reach and frequency metrics were also analyzed to streamline budget performances. For the banner campaign, the average fraud was around 17% invalid traffic with a major chunk coming from repeated IP bots 14.49%, and the rest of the invalid traffic was from invalid geographies, DCH, and low intent users. After implementing mFilterIt CTV ad traffic validation, the brand saw a significant improvement in its campaign performance. This led to a 4% increase in conversion rate and an 11% lift in ROI. Impact of CTV Traffic Fraud Addressing CTV ad traffic fraud is essential to protect advertising investments and ensure accurate performance measurement. Implementing advanced fraud detection solutions can mitigate these impacts, leading to more effective and efficient CTV advertising campaigns. Wasted Ad Spend: A significant portion of the advertising budget is lost to fraudulent traffic. CTV fraud detection and ad Traffic validation can identify any ineffective allocation of marketing resources. Distorted Performance Metrics: Inaccurate data on ad impressions and engagement due to skewed metrics leading
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Ad Fraud in Programmatic Ads: Why Impression-Level Protection Matters
Performance Programmatic Platforms follow the same rules as traditional programmatic platforms, but the focus on performance campaigns is to optimize ad placements through real-time bidding and enable data-driven decision-making. These platforms buy and place ads for advertisers with targeting functionalities, dynamic creative optimization, and performance analysis. As they market themselves, the entire process is ML and algorithm-driven. However, there is a prevailing myth that these platforms are fraud-free. Even MMPs are failing to do anything to curb these frauds because they have no protection at the impression level and minimum protection at clicks. Let’s delve deeper to burst the myth and highlight what advertisers need to do to optimize campaigns on performance programmatic platforms. The Myth of Fraud-Free Performance Programmatic Platforms With the sophisticated technology behind performance programmatic advertising, these platforms are propagated to be fraud-free. This misconception arises from the belief that advanced algorithms and data-driven strategies can fully protect against fraudulent activities. However, fraudulent activities such as click fraud, impression fraud, and fake installs continue to plague the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Fraudsters constantly evolve their tactics to exploit system vulnerabilities. Many programmatic platforms claim to have robust ad fraud detection solution mechanisms, but these measures often fall short in practice. That’s where a third-party independent validator is needed. The sheer volume of transactions and the complexity create numerous opportunities for invalid traffic to slip through the cracks. Type of Fraud on Performance Programmatic Platforms 1. Impression Fraud: Impression injection artificially inflates the number of ad impressions, executed by generating fake impressions in the background, later if the user downloads and installs an application organically or inorganically, the attribution gets stolen. This technique manipulates the ad delivery system to make it appear as though ads are being viewed more frequently than they are. 2. Click Fraud: Fraudsters generate fake ad requests that make it appear as though legitimate users are viewing ads. These can be triggered by bots or automated scripts. 3. Imperceptible Window: Ads may be loaded in ways that are invisible to the user, such as in a background process or in a 1×1 pixel iframe, ensuring they are not seen by actual humans. 4. Ad Stacking: Sometimes multiple ads are stacked on top of each other, but only one is visible. Each ad in the stack registers an impression, leading to inflated impression counts. 5. Fraudsters also exploit software development kits (SDKs) within legitimate apps to load ads in the background without the user’s knowledge. 6. Fake Devices: non-genuine or simulated devices to generate fraudulent ad activity or BOT-based impressions that are totally junk. Fraudsters use device emulators or simulators to mimic the behavior of multiple real devices. This allows them to generate fake traffic at a scale. 7. Device Farms: collections of physical devices, often managed by automated systems, that repeatedly engage with ads to create the illusion of genuine user activity. Fraudsters also manipulate device identifiers, such as Android Device IDs, to create fake device profiles. 8. IP Fraud: Fraudsters also use Invalid IP (use of VPNs) and get impressions from regions not targeted which results in high impressions but low ROI. Challenges in Optimizing Ad Campaigns 1. Myth of No Ad Fraud: The first thing is busting the bubble and countering the myth that there is no fraud on impressions, programmatic-based partners, or programmatic performance. Once advertisers accept the fact then proactive measures for full-funnel protection can be put in place to tackle ad fraud at every level and elevate campaign performance. 2. Brand Safety Issues: Next is combating brand safety issues with safe and relevant placement, protecting brand reputation. 3. Frequency Cap Violations: The most common and often neglected issue is FCAP violations along with bots spamming impressions for payouts. Brands need to be vigilant and identify F-cap violations to make sure their ad reaches the broader and relevant audience and is not seen by similar sets multiple times to generate impressions leading to ad fatigue, not conversions. 4. Down-the-funnel KPIs are ignored: Aggregators also mix traffic and sell it by the name of premium inventory. In case of fraud, the clean publisher gets a bad reputation. Since the organic is stolen, down the funnel, is going to be met. Limitations of Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) MMPs provide insights into user behavior, campaign effectiveness, and ROI. However, their ability to curb fraud is limited. 1. MMPs typically focus on tracking clicks and conversions but have minimal protection against impression fraud. 2. Impression fraud involves generating fake ad impressions to inflate metrics, which can mislead advertisers about the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns. While MMPs do have mechanisms to identify and filter out invalid clicks, these protections are often not comprehensive enough to detect all fraudulent clicks. 3. Another key issue with MMPs is attribution challenges as fraudsters often use tactics like click injection and click spamming to manipulate attribution models. MMPs, despite their advanced analytics, can struggle to differentiate between legitimate user actions and fraudulent activities, leading to incorrect attribution and wasted ad spending. Let’s get a better understanding of the challenges and how mFilterIt helped resolve them Case 1: How A Popular Gaming Brand Optimizes Performance in USA – App Campaign For instance, Let’s take the case of a trusted and most popular gaming platform in the US. The app offers a variety of games across a range of categories, such as card games, casual games, etc. Fraud at Impression Level: On Android, the fraud at the impression level was as high as 33% among over 56 million impressions generated, while on the iOS platform, 14% fraudulent impressions were detected among 4.8 million impressions. The major chunk of fraudulent impression was due to impression Injection, and the rest came from Invalid IP addresses, or sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT). Fraud At Click Level: Among million and above clicks 11% were fraudulent on the Android platform. 6.13% of clicks were generated via click Injection and 3.69% came from fake devices while on the iOS platform, among 98, 800 plus clicks, 6%
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Validating Leads via Pixel: A Smart Way to Ensure Quality
In the world of digital marketing, getting leads is just one part of the puzzle. Ensuring those leads are high-quality is what truly matters. One of the most effective ways to validate leads is by using a conversion pixel. A conversion pixel is a small piece of code that you add to your website to track and measure specific user actions. When used correctly, it helps you to filter out the irrelevant bots traffic and focus on genuine human filled leads that are more likely to convert. How you can validate leads with a pixel: Set Up Your Pixel: The first step is to install the pixel on your website or landing page. Whether you’re using Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or any other platform, most of them provides an easy guides to integrate their conversion pixel code on your website landing and thank you page. You can also choose any third party pixel to do the same, mFilterIt Visit and Conversion pixels are similar to any of these advertising platforms pixel. Pixels allow you to track user interaction in real-time, from filling out a contact form to clicking on a product page. Track Specific Actions: With the right pixel in place, you can start tracking specific actions that indicate lead quality. For example, you can track form submissions, page visits, or time spent on a particular page. Users who engage more deeply with your content are likely more interested, and therefore, their actions are better indicators of a qualified lead. mFilterIt’s event pixel does the same and provides you tons of data points and KPIs to compare and make insightful decisions from the incoming traffic’s data. Monitor Behavior Patterns: By tracking behavior, you can gain valuable insights on the leads, being which have most engaged with your business and filled by a genuine user. For instance, a user who visits your pricing page and spends time reading your product details is probably more likely to convert than someone who merely clicks through to homepage. Refine Your Lead Generation Efforts: Once you validate leads through pixel tracking, you can optimize your ad campaigns, tailor your content, and refine your targeting to focus on high-quality converting traffic and can weed out the incoming bots traffic whose goal is to simply drain out your campaign budgets. This helps you make better decisions on where to allocate your resources and ultimately boost your conversion rates. Validating leads through mFilterIt’s Ad Fraud Solution, Visit and Conversion pixels is a smart way to ensure you’re focusing on the right prospects, increasing your chances of engaging genuine user with your ads.
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Brand Bidding: Do not allow your Affiliates and Competitors to steal Your Spotlight
Have you ever wondered why your brand name is showing in the sponsored search when you are not paying for advertising? Because of brand bidding. A magical, quick, and powerful covenant process that can turn into a deadly curse when affiliates aggressively bid on your brand keywords, purely for traffic or competition bidding on your brand keyword to rob you of the spotlight your brand deserves. What is brand bidding? Why is it a problem for Advertisers? Brand bidding refers to a practice that falls under paid search marketing. It’s a digital marketing strategy where brands bid on their own brand keywords in search engine advertising platforms like Google Ads and when someone searches for your brand name, your company’s sponsored listing is more likely to appear at the top of the search results page. But this turns into a brand reputation threat and leads when aggressive affiliate bids, potentially aiming to capture traffic and drive sales through affiliate programs or competition bids on your brand keywords. Simply put, it’s the practice of bidding on your own brand keywords to pop up on the top. Exploring The Dark Side of Brand Bidding: Affiliates and Competitors bid on Brand keywords There is no questioning the effectiveness of brand bidding in increasing visibility and guarding the brand, but it too has its own problems. One of its major drawbacks is the situation whereby there’s excessive bidding from affiliates and rival brands. Revenue Hijacking: Affiliates may bid on your brand keywords with the intention of capturing traffic and driving sales through their own affiliate programs, potentially diverting revenue away from your website. Brand Hijacking: Competitors may bid on your brand keywords to confuse consumers and potentially drive traffic to their own websites. Market Share Erosion: This can lead to a loss of market share and brand reputation if customers are misled or confused. The impact of brand bidding by Affiliate and Competiton Aggressive bidding from affiliates and competitors can drive up the cost per click (CPC) for your brand keywords, leading to higher advertising expenses. This lead to Loss of Revenue: If affiliates or competitors successfully capture traffic through their ads, it can result in lost revenue for your brand. Damaged Brand Reputation: Confusion and frustration caused by misleading ads can tarnish your brand’s image and reputation. It is important to identify who is bidding on your brand keywords. Are they authorized to bid on brand keyword or not? Continuously monitor your brand’s search performance and report any instances of affiliate or competitor misconduct to the relevant advertising platforms. By proactively addressing these challenges, you can protect your brand, maintain control over your online presence, and ensure that the benefits of brand bidding outweigh the potential drawbacks. A Case Study: Brand Bidding for a Popular Shoe Brand mFilterIt analysis and insights into the effectiveness of brand bidding, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of a well-known shoe brand across major Indian cities. Keyword Tracking: We meticulously monitored 35 keywords related to the brand, including brand keyword variations across 35 cities. This allowed us to understand the search queries users were employing to find the brand. Search Volume: The brand garnered a significant search volume across time slots. This indicated strong interest in and demand for the brand. Google Ads Activity: A substantial 50% of the total searches were Google Ads for the brand’s keywords. This demonstrated the competitive landscape and the efforts of various entities to capture search traffic. Competitor Analysis: We identified 28% were competitors count which were actively bidding on the brand’s keywords. This highlighted the intense competition for visibility and market share. Affiliate Activity: 22% of the total came from affiliates and coupon websites who were also bidding on the bidding keywords. This revealed that affiliates were also using brand keywords and running ads. Here are some key observation and Findings: Organic Poaching by aggressive Affiliate Bidding: Affiliates & coupon websites were particularly active in bidding on brand keywords, potentially aiming to capture traffic and drive sales. They were capturing organic users. This is called organic poaching. The brand was having to pay commissions to affiliates where the customer would have come organically. Competition on Brand Keywords: Competitors were actively bidding on the brand’s keywords, which meant that competition keyword strategies needed to be buit within the marketing approach. Beyond Bidding: Value-Based Optimization for Competiton Bidding on Brand Keywords Location-Based Campaign Optimization Combine actionable insights and location-based campaign optimization, you can create more targeted and effective brand bidding campaigns. This approach can help you improve your return on investment, enhance customer engagement, and drive business growth. Target specific regions enable tailoring your campaigns to different geographic locations based on factors like demographics, search volume, and competitive landscape. Optimize bids to adjust bids for specific locations to maximize performance and ROI. Leverage geo-targeting features to target ads to users within specific geographic areas. LOCOKS (Location-Based Campaign Optimization Keyword Strategy) with mFilterIt Effectively implement LOCOKS, mFilterIt offers valuable tools for tracking and optimizing keyword usage. By monitoring how competitor keywords are used in different cities and at various times of the day, mFilterIt provides actionable insights that can be used to tailor campaigns for improved relevance and efficiency. This data-driven approach ensures that your brand bidding efforts are aligned with local search trends and maximize their impact. Expanding the Scope of Brand Bidding While traditional brand bidding focuses on protecting your brand and improving visibility, it’s essential to consider the broader implications of this strategy. Customer Experience: Brand bidding can significantly enhance the user experience by ensuring that customers are directed to your website seamlessly. This can lead to increased conversions and brand loyalty. Competitive Advantage: By effectively implementing brand bidding, you can gain a competitive edge over rivals who may not be as proactive in protecting their brand. Brand Protection: Preventing competitors from hijacking your brand can safeguard your reputation and prevent potential confusion among consumers. Best Practices for Brand Bidding Competitors or affiliates may bid on your brand keywords,
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Affiliate Fraud: Detect, Defend & Protect your Brand
Affiliate marketing has emerged as one of the most viable sales promotion strategies that brands employ today. However, the rapid rise in affiliate marketing fraud has become a significant concern, as businesses can lose hundreds of billions every year with fraudulent activities. Affiliate marketing campaign are not excluded from these schemes, and mFilterIt reports indicate that affiliate fraud may result in the potential loss of up to 30-35%. For most businesses, affiliate advertising fraud wastes promotional, and marketing spends, which would be recovered with smart monitoring tools. What is Affiliate Fraud? Affiliate ad fraud refers to the fraudulent acts of malicious affiliates that exploit the system to wrongly earn commissions. They go through marketing procedures in the wrong manner and are making false conversions, clicks, or leads, which inflates the marketing metrics and ad spends for a brand without giving a good ROI on the campaign. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, affiliate marketing is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.1%. Hence, the need for efficient tools to detect and prevent ad fraud is more important to optimize spending, minimize losses, and protect brand integrity. Why is affiliate fraud so serious? It is a very significant reason to distinguish why affiliate fraud should not be taken lightly because it usually leads to severe financial losses and damage to the reputation of the brands. The issues range from ad fraud, both general and sophisticated, to matters such as brand infringements and fake brand communication by affiliates, in which the unethical affiliates misuse the brand resources for personal gain. Ad Fraud Impact Affiliate ad fraud undermines ad effectiveness because it artificially inflates conversion metrics. Ad fraud issues like lead punching, ad stacking where several ads are layered to get impressions, and fake clicks impact brands. Over time, these acts prove counterproductive to marketing efficiency, present misleading data, and tremendous brand loss. In an environment where ad budgets are significantly constricted, failure to focus on these types of fraud will be detrimental to the long-term success of the campaign. Concerns with Brand Infringements with Affiliates Affiliate infringements are far more prevalent than traditional ad fraud. That is a set of practices that are unethical and could damage the reputation of a brand. This includes a practice known as brand bidding, in which the trademark of a brand is used to drive traffic to their sites, or the use of influencer coupon codes to inflate sales metrics artificially. Very often, affiliates would also make IP violations such as typo-squatting, a method that uses small misspell of the brand’s URL to route traffic to harmful websites. Such violations not only compromise the overall effectiveness of the affiliate campaign but also erode the trust created between the brand and its legitimate affiliates. Types of Affiliate Ad Campaigns Brand must Track for Full-Funnel Protection There are different types of affiliate fraud contingent upon the commission structure of the campaign, and they may be classified as follows: Cost-Per-Click (CPC) In this, for every click on an ad, the affiliate would make money. It is prone to click fraud wherein bots and click farms inflate the number of clicks but engage no real customer. Cost-Per-Leads (CPL) The affiliates are paid according to customer actions such as the form submissions and signing up on emails. In this aspect, the most common tactic fraudsters would use is fake leads or invalid customer actions. Cost-Per-Sale (CPS) Affiliates get paid according to commissions on sales that are completed. Manipulation with this model typically happens through the pushing of fake transactions or exploiting return policies for gaining commissions from sales later reversed. Common Issues in Ad Fraud Of course, ad fraud manifests in many ways, and the most common categories included are listed below: Lead Punching- Bad or low-quality leads are generated to earn a commission. These convert into no sales, and hence marketing dollars go to waste. Organic Poaching- They steal the organic traffic and dupe tracking systems to earn commissions for sales they never help make. Ad Stacking- Here, multiple ads are overlapped on top of one another in unnoticeable ways in which impressions are created that seem to be real but do not engage the user. IP & Proxy – There are certain techniques that are used in affiliate marketing fraud and these fraudulent schemes are carried out by creating malicious locations using IP spoofing and proxy servers to generate fake traffic and clicks that cannot be traced. Imperceptible Window – Techniques used include showing advertisements through small, transparent or overlay ads that are not seen by the user hence resulting in fake impressions or fake clicks without the knowledge of the user. Click Fraud – It occurs when a company’s automated bot or dishonest user simply repeats online advertisements or incurs damages to the clicked ad in order to exhaust most of the company’s resources. Brand Infringement Issues for Affiliates Affiliates’ infringement includes unauthorized uses that compromise a brand’s intellectual property or marketing efforts. Affiliate infringements include the following, though not limited to: Brand Bidding- Affiliates use a brand’s keywords or trademarks while competing with that brand. This type of practice has increased costs to a brand and easily confuses consumers. Duplicate Products- Sometimes, affiliates make duplicate products that dilute brand presence, present various prices at these sub-sites while making others unavailable and bring discrepancies in pricing. Misuse of Influencer Coupon Codes- Some affiliates distribute the influencer coupon codes to people beyond the intended reach. Doing this implies that the sales metrics inflated do not represent genuine consumer intent behind it. Violations with IP and Typo-Squatting- Affiliates open up fake websites that resemble the domain of the brand closely and capture the misdirected traffic thus misleading consumers. Brand Information Misrepresentation- Affiliates often give false information about a brand’s products or services that smear the brand’s reputation and result in revenue loss. How mFilterIt protected a Global FinTech Brand from Affiliate Fraud A leading fintech player collaborated with mFilterIt to fight affiliate fraud on a global scale. mFilterIt affiliate
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