Expert Opinion - mfilterit

How An eCom Brand Boosted Discoverability by Monitoring it’s Sponsored ‘Brand’ Keywords?

An FMCG conglomerate with the largest influence in South-East Asia was bidding on its brand keywords across e-commerce platforms like Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, etc. It only had access to the analyticsoffered by the marketplace, specifically campaign performance. The brand wanted to know factors that were influencing the buying decision of the online shoppers beyond the analytics provided by the e-commerce platform. mScanIt e-commerce intelligence, provided an in-depth analysis on discoverability and Share-of-Shelf (SOS), which is one of the biggest factors influencing the buying behavior of an online shopper. SOS monitors the discoverability of the product listings on e-commerce marketplace based on brand, competition, and generic keyword searches. Download Submit

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Fake Customer Care Numbers A Nightmare For The BFSI Sector

Case Study, Brand Protection / Expert Opinion

Fake Customer Care Numbers were a nightmare for a BFSI Sector giant. mFilterIt’s Brand Infringement Monitoring solution scanned over 2400 cities on the Internet (Google, Maps and reviews, social media, websites) to detect the presence of fake customer care numbers. Maharastra and Gujarat were high in such incidences with 667 cases, followed by Punjab, Delhi, and Haryana with 349 cases. West Bengal reported 290 incidences of brand impersonation. Over 2500 cases of fake customer care numbers were found on Google’s Q&A section. Download Submit

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Detecting & Fighting Back Against Negative Reviews Through eCom Competitive Analysis

Case Study, E-Commerce / Expert Opinion

A leading biscuit manufacturer in India, with chocolate-filled and almond cookies as two of its best variants, was receiving a lot of negative reviews on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, BigBasket, Flipkart, etc. The company needed to understand the sentiment of the users posting the reviews on e-commerce platforms by an eCommerce Competitive Analysis solution. mScanIt helped the brand by conducting a detailed sentiment analysis of the reviews for their SKUs. Nearly 57% decrease in negative reviews about packaging of two of the most premium variants of the brand and 65% positive reviews in April compared to the previous average of 47%. Download Submit

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How a Travel Booking Brand Identified and Weeded Out Bot Traffic Affecting Their Ad Campaigns

Case Study, Ad Fraud, Brand Protection / Expert Opinion

The travel industry is abuzz with the onset of the vacation season. Online travel bookings have witnessed an upsurge in bookings as travelers are planning their summer vacation with family. Resultant, there’s a rise in digital transactions across travel and booking platforms. To make the most of the revenge traveling and planned traveling among users, brands are investing heavily in digital campaigns and advertisements to attract users with tempting offers. mFilterIt analyzed the visit and event summary of a leading online travel booking platform in India to understand the sudden upsurge in website and app traffic with no sales activity. Download Submit

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Delivery TAT – Should You Be Careful About It?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

The agile eCommerce businesses in India have always been on the ascending side. The bars heightened with the pandemic-induced rise in online shopping. According to Statista, in 2019 online sales were $42.58 billion. The same study shows that e-retail sales will rise up to $83.75 billion by the end of 2022 and are projected to reach $145.07 billion by 2025. Highly likely, no signs of downfall! The above statistics are quite evidence that Indian eCommerce is robust and booming for its immense potential of enhancing consumer buying experience. It broadened the scope for major brands to aggressively endorse themselves on eCommerce marketplaces to expand their realms. They shook hands with these platforms to capture a larger market share. With customer satisfaction in focus, brands display discounted prices, lucrative offers, and other such deals which, no doubt, help them keep up their reputation. However, delivery turnaround time also has a crucial role to play. They must honor the importance of tracking delivery turnaround time as numerous strategic and profitable decisions can be made based on the analysis. Tracking Delivery Turnaround Time to Stay Competitive Delivery Time Identification for a Particular City and Pin Code Delivery time tracking for a brand is in part tracing how fast a product reaches a specific city and pin code. It is a geo-analysis of the delivery time trend for a brand giving a clear bifurcation as per the locations, cities, and pin codes, where your brand is present. Now, this analysis can open up insights into optimizing the delivery time. Once you have the respective delivery time for different locations, you are at the epicenter of strategizing for reducing delivery time, wherever possible. It can be through the choice of shipment, scaling up the warehousing in an area, or perhaps, leasing new warehouses. Delivery Time Analysis for Brand SKUs and Variants Your SKU performance is contingent on delivery time to a large extent. Delivery time analytics forms the basis of categorizing your SKUs with a higher delivery time, SKUs with an average delivery time, and SKUs with less delivery time. This raises some questions How can I maintain less delivery time for my performing SKUs? What factors can cause a delay in the delivery time of my SKUs? Why is the delivery time for this particular SKU higher? How can reduce the delivery time for my SKUs? Is it even possible to reduce the delivery time for my SKUs? You can actively participate in the supply chain for full visibility of your SKUs. This way you might have possible reasons for higher delivery TAT of your SKUs and work out a plan of action to maintain as well reduce the delivery time, wherever possible. For the SKUs that cannot be delivered before the time span of say 5-7 days keep your customers pre-intimated. Tracking Delivery Time of Your Product Verses Your Competition As mentioned before, the delivery time of your product is one of the determinants of its performance. With delivery time analysis you get a better understanding of the number of days your competition is taking to deliver the product. Also, your competition’s delivery TAT data with respect to different cities and pin codes is also available. You can use these insights to have an edge over your competitor. For Example, you can tap the locations for which the product delivery time of your competition is higher by using faster shipment methods like airways or railways. Expand the warehousing facility to stock products in regions where your competitor is lacking in delivery performance. Delivery TAT Tracking For Best Seller Analysis The role of authorized sellers in eCommerce marketplaces is not limited to supplying goods. Their market expertise can legit expand your consumer base. These sellers specialize in spotting the right audience, promoting your product, and delivering customer satisfaction which translates into larger sales, more profit, and brand recognition. Delivery TAT tracking can, to a great extent, can make your search for the most reliable marketplace seller quick and easy. Is your delivery product delivery time high even when your seller has enough stock available? If yes, you can raise a question on the credibility of your seller and begin searching for authorized sellers. Reducing Delivery TAT – Concluding Thought A brand got delivery TAT analysis done versus its competition on Amazon and Flipkart for a specific month. It basically recorded the percentage delivery TAT in relation to the number of days taken to deliver the product. This data would have been instrumental in creating strategies to streamline the supply chain and eventually, optimizing the delivery time. Now, this brand would have utilized TAT analysis to reduce delivery time because it knows that customer satisfaction is highly dependent on quick delivery, within a day or two maybe. It tactically adapted to the changing customer behaviour in the era of growing eCommerce. The brand might have keenly monitored the entire supply chain process, worked on key problematic areas to ensure seamless and timely delivery. With this brand story, the purpose was to communicate the happy customer base is directly proportionate to lower delivery TAT. With our proprietary eCommerce intelligence solution mScanIt, brands can easily scan their delivery TAT. It performs delivery time analysis for the brand versus its competition and gives actionable insights.

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What is the Impact of Fraud in Retargeting Campaigns?

Leave a Comment / Ad Traffic Validation, Blog / Expert Opinion

Retargeting is a form of behavioral targeting as it targets people who have already visited a website. It allows you to target the users with relevant ads when they visit other websites. The most successful retargeting creative includes a clear call-to-action and a particular offer that entices users to make a purchase. After a visitor leaves your website without making a purchase, retargeting reminds them about your products and services. Apps, search, and website banner ads all function with retargeting. Retargeting is vital for connecting with customers and growing revenue for today’s serious marketers. Retargeting works by employing “cookies,” which are little pieces of data saved by the browser that track who has seen your ad or visited your website. Marketing teams can then utilize the cookie data to retarget the users with the relevant ads. This is to target the users who have expressed an interest in a specific product or service and, in a way, help you increase the conversions and help in brand promotion/awareness. Retargeting helps you increase online sales by keeping your brand in front of customers’ eyes and attracting “window shoppers” when they’re ready to buy. Your brand gets momentum and reputation every time a customer views your retargeting advertising. The importance of solid branding and recurrent exposure is underlined by the high click-through rates and conversions of retargeting campaigns. Major Impact of Retargeting Fraud Advertisers and marketers are plagued with ad fraud. Retargeting is re-engaging the users who have shown a strong desire to take a down-funnel action. The fraudulent activity is unaffected by the user’s level of engagement, whether it’s through simulated clicks or installs. Imagine if the ads are being served to bots instead of actual users and there is no call-to-action; it has implications as it increases the advertising cost and delivers poor results. The fraudsters sabotage good quality traffic by generating invalid traffic, impacting the marketing budgets. Bots/invalid traffic, in a way, affects the Advertiser’s marketing strategy as it skews the analytics and other metrics that help them make better business decisions. Almost 30-40% of the Advertiser marketing budgets are exhausted due to these bots (non-humans) or invalid bot traffic that never get converted. Advertisers must remove these malicious bots from the retargeting system to improve the ROI. The marketers need to safeguard themselves and ensure that their efforts are spent only on retargeting genuine human prospects rather than harmful bots. Overall, it leads to a loss of advertising revenue, reduced ROIs, and increased lead generation/referral payouts. Furthermore, unprotected retargeting campaigns produce phony high-performance results, inflate keyword bids, deflate ad visibility, and reduce the effectiveness of search ads. ● Keyword Bid Inflation Retargeting campaigns target prospects for boosting sales /conversions. The campaign consists of users captured through cookies, dynamic, or list-based methods. Moreover, it comprises keywords for increasing the ROI by reaching people not enlisted in the campaign but interested in the product/service. However, bidding similar keywords on digital ads can inflate the bid price. Fraudsters infiltrate the retargeting campaigns of brands by becoming prospects. They use bots to add products into the cart and eventually abandon them and leave the website. Advertisers add these bots, displaying human-like behavior to the remarketing list. Moreover, fraudsters even use bots to click brands’ ads and boost impressions, clicks, and visits. So, advertisers think that their retargeting campaigns are delivering high performance. On the other hand, fraudsters use these deliverables to acquire financial gain from advertisers. The high performance of the campaigns also inflates the cost of keywords and diminishes the brand’s advertising budget faster than usual. Advertisers fall for the bots because they are sophisticated bots/undetectable. So, the analytics show the desired results, and advertisers boost their advertising budget. Eventually, the cost of retargeting fraud causes a loss of millions to advertisers and diminishes the retargeting efforts. ● Diminished Visibility Our study reveals that marketers and advertisers use 20-45% of the ad spending on retargeting campaigns. They engage in such activity expecting a higher than 25% return from a usual ad. Unfortunately, the penetration of fraudsters using bots into the remarketing lists displays them as prospects. So, the potential ROI from a retargeting campaign is never achieved by advertisers/marketers. Fraudsters habitually follow the money, and retargeting campaigns seem like a honey pot. Therefore, they continuously engage in ad-stacking, pixel stuffing, cooking stuffing, and other ad frauds to obtain financial gain from retargeting ads. Moreover, retargeting fraud increases the cost of impressions/views on ads. Brands build recall value or obtain mind space through retargeting campaigns. Higher visibility can also increase conversions. Unfortunately, retargeting fraud diminishes visibility and distorts the potential results. Eventually, the effectiveness of retargeting ads is hampered. ● Distorted Search Ad Results Another dramatic side effect of fraud on retargeting campaigns is that it distorts paid search ads. A tracking code is installed on a brand’s website to display custom ads to users on a partner site. The display/video ads are based on the products searched by the user on the brand’s website. The remarketing list consists of commonly searched keywords on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., and the brand’s web pages. Marketers and advertisers believe that setting up a remarketing/retargeting campaign eliminates ad fraud, including prospect users. But fraudsters cannibalize the remarketing list by using sophisticated bots to infiltrate it. So, ad fraud is eliminated through such campaigns is a myth, and only an ad fraud elimination solution can detect & eliminate fraud. Advertisers use sources like Google Ads tag, Google Analytics (GA), App Analytics, Ads Data Hub, etc., available on Google for creating data tags to upload on the website. In addition, they commonly generate prospect user lists by using metatags on the first page of the website. Optionally, they can even detect prospects through the added data tags in the Google Site Kit extension of site builders like Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace. Takeaway Most marketers and advertisers spend a significant amount of their advertising budget on remarketing initiatives. Customer Data Management systems and remarketing lists

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Why Creative Compliance Must Be a Necessity Not A Choice For Your Brand?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Protection, Creative Compliance - Ticker / Expert Opinion

In the hustle to stand out in the crowd of competitors, brands often miss out on things at the ground level. Where there are many options for consumers in the market, 91% of consumers are inclined towards brands that are authentic to their claims. To bring authenticity and growth on one track, many regulatory bodies are working actively to ensure that the brands are growing while consumer rights remain protected. However, amidst this wave of marketing compliance, a majority of companies ignore checking the compliance of their creatives. Only 29% of the brands claim to evaluate their creatives for a compliance check regularly. Meanwhile, the media agencies and in-house teams still manually process their ad creatives. Due to the endless requirements of brand creative assets, it becomes challenging for the in-house creative teams to stay aligned with the industry and brand compliances for creatives. Manual verification of creatives leads to issues like posting irregular, flawed, and irrelevant creatives across platforms. Furthermore, this may impact the overall brand’s positioning among consumers. The Buzz Is According to the latest report released by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), the biggest violator of the advertising code is the education sector followed by healthcare, gaming, personal care, and food & beverages. Further, the advertisement regulatory body also shared that the complaint against ads increased by up to 14% between April and September of this year. In this one year, they have processed 3,340 complaints against 2764 advertisements that were found as potential violators of the ASCI code. In addition to this, the regulatory body added that out of the total complaints received 28% of the violations were committed by the influencers. And about 87% of the advertisements having influencers were to be a violation of the influencer guidelines. Impact Of a Non-Compliant Creative 1. Reputational Damage It takes years for a brand to build a reputation in the eyes of consumers. And a simple thing like a misleading ad creative can ruin this within a few seconds. When a brand makes false claims about its product or service, the consumer believes them. And when they don’t get the claimed benefit, they feel cheated and take action against the brand further ruining its reputation. 2. Legal Issues The repercussions of a false claim or misleading and creative are not limited to just reputational damage. When the consumer’s trust is damaged and they feel cheated, the angry consumers can boycott the brand, spread negative reviews, or worst they can sue the brand for the damages. This will further put the brand in the negative spotlight resulting in hefty litigation costs. 3. Losing Customer’s Trust When brands make false claims or post misleading ads, consumers often perceive them to be deceitful. The negative news related to the brand not just impacts the existing consumers but also the new consumers. This impacts the overall reputation of the brand and ruins the prospects of the business. 4. Loses Revenue The brand has to bear a high cost for a misleading ad. Apart from reputational damage and loss of consumer trust, the brand also has to bear the wastage of ad revenue. Due to the misleading creatives, they are not able to attract the right audience and end up wasting the ad revenue with no return. How can brands avoid these situations? The ASCI has made certain regulations that ensure the brand’s ad creatives are marketing compliant. This means that the creatives must comply with the regulatory requirements set up to protect the marketers and their consumers. However, it is very difficult for the brands to do a manual check for every creative. Hence, they need an advanced solution to ensure the ad creatives are compliant with the ASCI and brand guidelines. mFilterIt’s creative compliance intelligence tool is focused to bring standardization to the ad creatives of the brand across platforms. With the help of AI and ML capabilities, the tool will ensure that all the ad creatives comply with the guidelines set up by the brand and ASCI. In addition to this, the tool can also be used to audit the social media and website of the brand to bring a governance system across the owned and advertising brand assets. The Need Of The Hour Creative compliance is not a choice but a necessity for a brand to ensure that they are represented similarly across all platforms. Along with protecting the brand from trademark and copyright issues, the brands must also keep an active check on their brand assets going on different platforms. It’s time for brands to wake up and indulge in a more consumer-safe and transparent way of advertising.

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Achieving Higher Share-of-Shelf on Competitor’s Sponsored Keywords On eCom Platforms

Case Study, E-Commerce / Expert Opinion

A global oral care brand with an exponential presence across South-East Asia wanted to know the digital Share-of-Shelf (SOS) of its brand’s toothpaste product on the competitor’s sponsored keyword listings on eCom platforms like Lazada, Shopee, Tokopedia, etc. Using mScanIt, the brand increased the brand’s SOS and competitor keywords increased brand awareness and discoverability of sponsored listings on eCommerce platforms. Increased Search Ranking and Positioning and capturing more SOS by bidding on new competitor keywords increased the brand’s search rank and page positioning of its sponsored listing. Engaged with a Wider Target Audience Download Submit

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How A Leading Color Cosmetics Brand Optimized Delivery Turn Around Time (TAT) with Digital Commerce Intelligence

Case Study, E-Commerce / Expert Opinion

One of Asia’s premier color cosmetics production company, renowned for its extensive range of direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty and personal care brands, enhanced product performance across various eCommerce platforms and geographical locations with mFilterIt. The key objective was to optimize the Delivery Turn-Around Time (TAT) for the company’s sub-brands, product categories, sub-categories, and product variants, with a special focus on their best-selling beauty products. The Color Cosmetics brand optimized Delivery TAT for products and ensured more than 50% of orders were delivered in 1 day or under. Download Submit

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Challenges In Programmatic Advertising: Know How You Can Combat Them

Leave a Comment / Blog, Programmatic / Expert Opinion

Programmatic has brought a revolutionary change in digital advertising. With its complete automation process, it has made it easier for advertisers to get the best place for their ads. However, every change comes with its own set of challenges. It is a challenging decision for an advertiser to make a move toward the big and promising world of real-time bidding advertising. All the things are shiny, but certainly, some red flags can be avoided to get the best returns on the ad spends. Programmatic advertising has portrayed itself as the best solution to traditional advertising. However, some challenges make it hard for advertisers to trust the ad-tech ecosystem blindly. We’re here to spill the beans on how these challenges are directly impacting your ad campaigns and what you can do to protect them. Read along and ensure that your brand doesn’t have to be the victim of fraudulent practices and other limitations of programmatic ads in the future. Programmatic Advertising – Challenges & Solutions 1. Lack of Transparency Due to programmatic advertising, many publishers have emerged that attract a large audience. Though the ideal goal of an advertiser is to reach a wider audience, these publishers cause a major concern for brand safety. These sites are usually low-quality and spam sites which redirect irrelevant traffic to the campaigns and impact the brand reputation. In addition to this, lack of transparency in the programmatic also impacts the decision of ad budget allocation for an advertiser. As they are unaware of the real impact of the ad campaigns and where their ads are showing, they are unable to decide which campaigns are genuinely performing better. Solution To solve this problem, mFilterIt’s ad fraud solution ensures that your ad campaign doesn’t consist of fraudulent and invalid traffic. We detect the sources of the malicious traffic and blacklist the fraudulent IP addresses to prevent the impact on future ad campaigns. 2. Viewability Issues As defined by the International Advertising Bureau, ad viewability is a standard metric to measure viewable impressions. According to them, an ad is considered viewable when it appears at least 50% on screen for more than one second. This is a quantifiable metric to know the percentage of ads that are viewed by real people. However, in programmatic advertising, many factors impact the viewability of an ad. Some of the factors are audience targeting, platform choices, and context which determines that the ads are shown to the right audience in real time and place. Solution Our Ad fraud software ensures that your digital ads are viewable to the targeted audience. Our solution also detects the ad placements on brand unsafe placements, masked websites, and sets of devices used for ad impressions. 3. Advertising Fraud & Bot Traffic According to a stat, “37% of ad buyers are worried about ad fraud”. And it has become a serious cause of concern in programmatic advertising. In the programmatic ecosystem, the landscape is littered with abusive vendors, non-human traffic sources, and click bots. And it’s an escalating problem because if you are basing your Return on Investment (ROI) on soft KPIs like impressions or views, then it is quite easy to fake fraudsters. In 2021, the traffic coming from bad bots accounted for 27.7% according to Statista. If taken the right measures to detect and prevent ad fraud, advertisers can get access to more accurate data and get a greater return on their ad spends. Solution To ensure that your ad campaigns are not impacted by fraudulent traffic and other ad fraud techniques, partner with an ad fraud detection tool provider like mFilterIt. Our fraud prevention and detection ensures to detect bot patterns and other fraud categories in your ad traffic and takes preventive actions to provide cleaner traffic. 4. Impact on Brand Safety Beyond the viewability issues and ad inventory problems, one of the biggest challenges with programmatic advertising is its impact on brand reputation. Beyond the revenue, if a brand’s reputation comes at stake, it can create havoc and ruin its image in front of its consumers. Apart from checking the quality of your traffic, a brand needs to ensure some additional things like: Where are your ads placed? What is the tone of your ad content? Is your content promoting anything illegal, scam, or fake? These checks are necessary to ensure that your ad doesn’t hurt the sentiments of your consumers and place you as a brand involved in illegal acts. Solution Keep a check on the placement of your ads and ensure that they are not showing on websites promoting violence, pornography, terrorism, fake news or hate speech. Conclusion Every revolutionary idea has its share of pros and cons. While Programmatic advertising comes with the above-mentioned challenges, it also comes with a plethora of benefits that can make a difference in the digital advertising space. To enjoy the best of both worlds, advertisers can take small steps to protect their ad campaigns and brand reputation. And while they do their part, an ad fraud prevention and detection solution provider like mFilterIt can help in making programmatic advertising a fraud-free space for your digital ad campaigns. By eliminating ad fraud in the programmatic space, advertisers can leverage the benefits of reaching the right audience and getting better returns on digital ad campaigns. Get in touch to learn more about programmatic advertising.

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