mFilterIt Experts

Decoding complex digital challenges like ad fraud, brand safety, brand protection, and ecommerce intelligence for brands to help them advertise fearlessly.

Stock Availability

Is lack of Accurate Stock Availability Metrics Impacting your Ecommerce Revenue?

Product availability is the key issue for brands looking to expand their presence across the fast-paced E-Commerce landscape. With the expansion of new categories that cater to shoppers’ last-minute needs, quick commerce platforms are expanding their horizons. There is a need to measure and monitor stock availability performance across platforms and geographies. Customer loyalty is affected by availability issues as the industry figures suggest that 20-30% of customers may switch to competitors permanently after encountering product unavailability. Also, Tier 2 and 3 cities may face upto 20% more disruptions due to logistical challenges caused by lack of accurate and high-quality availability metrics.  Let’s dive deeper and assess the core issues that brands face on ecommerce and quick commerce platforms. It is important that digital first customer-facing product-oriented brands today understand that reducing out-of-stock occurrences can lead to a lift of revenue by 5-8% with real-time business intelligence and insights.   Are you getting the right numbers on e-commerce and quick commerce platforms?   Every quick commerce and e-commerce platform has its own set of challenges, but getting out-of-stock poses a major challenge for brands looking to strike hard at the moment customers is looking for them. This not only puts them out of the race but also lose a loyal customer looking for your brand.   What should brands do to maintain stock availability? Keep track of every SKUs in real-time, drill deeper to find out which product is out-of-stock or about to be out-of-stock on which platforms and at which dark store under a pin-code. In-depth analysis and actionable insights are the only way to keep you ahead in this fast-paced race on online shopping platforms.   A brand stock-out or going out of stock (OOS) can occur due to various reasons like supply shortage, poor inventory management, inaccurate forecasting of demand or unexpected demand surge, etc. The key is digital commerce intelligence on stock availability and real-time alerts on Out-of-stock status.  The availability monitoring should not be limited, it should be a more granular update such as on certain pin codes where is your product available? Where they stand vs competition? On which platform brand need to stock it up?  For instance, a shopper looking for a specific product of the brand might search on multiple platforms as well.   This means brands must monitor their presence across platforms at the pin-code level and on the platform’s dark stores. Here are some key metrics that brands must track within the stock availability monitoring:   Brand availability trends versus competition   Availability share versus competition  City-wise availability trends – monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly  Platform-wise & geography-wise analysis  Heat map to identify new geography to target  Tracking Bottlers’ (Sellers) performance  Maintaining Out-of-Stock product lists & real-time alerts  This is where mScanIt, digital commerce intelligence comes in handy as it covers all aspects of product availability monitoring across platforms and geographies. Leading brands from FMCG, electronics, beauty and personal categories trust us as it covers more than 150 e-commerce and quick commerce platforms across the world, drilling deeper within city-level analysis along with global coverage of multiple geographies.   Case study: How a global leader in the beverage industry improved availability across platforms and geographies Problem Statement A global leader in the beverage industry faced challenges in ensuring consistent product availability across digital platforms in key AMESA (Africa, Middle East, and South Asia) markets. In September, product availability in the KSA region on prominent platforms like Quick Market, Carrefour, and Nana was inconsistent, reported at:  Quick Market: 28%  Carrefour: 57%  Nana: 86%.  This lack of availability led to:  Missed sales opportunities  A weakening of consumer trust and brand loyalty  Limited visibility in a competitive digital landscape  The company aimed to bolster its market presence by enhancing availability through real-time monitoring, identifying supply chain inefficiencies, and ensuring sellers maintained optimal stock levels.  How mFilterIt helped the brand boost its brand presence to match the competition across geographies To address these challenges, the company partnered with mFilterIt to implement the Digital Shelf Monitoring, mScanIt a cutting-edge solution designed to monitor product availability across multiple platforms and geographies along with other KPIs such as keyword share, product page content, Feedback analysis of rating & review and product pricing and promotions. Here’s how our capabilities lead the way.   Real-Time Monitoring with Regular updates on product availability and stock levels across Quick Market, Carrefour, and Nana.  Alerts for out-of-stock (OOS) items, enabling immediate corrective actions.  Gap Analysis helps identify bottlenecks in the supply chain impacting stock availability.  Provided detailed insights into seller performance and platform-specific challenges.  Actionable Recommendations helped develop region-specific strategies to enhance stock levels, such as improving coordination with bottlers and distributors.  Prioritized high-demand SKUs to maximize availability during peak shopping periods.  Performance tracking with continuously targeting improvements in availability and visibility.  The results with digital commerce intelligence and shelf monitoring By the end of November, significant improvements were observed across platforms:  Quick Market: Availability rose from 28% to 51% (+82%).  Carrefour: Achieved 100% availability, up from 57% (+75%).  Nana: Improved from 86% to 94% (+9%).  Fig. 1: Product Availability Across Platforms September to November   These improvements translated into:  Enhanced customer trust and satisfaction by ensuring products were consistently available.  Strengthened market share and sales across key platforms, solidifying the brand’s position in the AMESA region.  Through mScanIt, digital commerce intelligence and shelf monitoring – availability analysis, the beverage leader transformed its operational approach, leveraging data-driven insights to achieve exceptional results in a competitive market.  Optimize Customer Journey with Digital Commerce Intelligence Do not limit to just stock availability tracking! It’s essential to consider various analytical metrics to optimize the customer’s journey across e-commerce and quick commerce platforms. Each stage requires a tailored approach to ensure that the brand’s presence is effectively communicated, and customer engagement is maximized across the digital shelf.  This journey can be optimized at three broad levels with digital commerce intelligence:    Awareness and Interest Stage Brands must track visibility and ensure that products are accurately featured throughout the marketplace. This phase boosts awareness and

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ad fraud

Full-Funnel Ad Fraud Protection: Beyond Impressions & Viewability

Ad Spending in the US market will reach $421 billion in 2024. Out of a market worth $143 billion, TV and video Advertising stands out as the largest market there. Accurately measuring an ad campaign’s effectiveness is essential. It is the marketer’s job to protect against waste and improve campaigns’ ROI. Adopting ad fraud detection tool driven by AI-ML tech can achieve this. According to the Statista Report, by 2029, it has been estimated that 87% of advertising revenue in the United States will be attributable to programmatic advertising. Need for Full Funnel Protection When it comes to combating ad fraud, one must understand that the focus on impressions alone will not work. It is imperative to adopt full-funnel protection, focusing on detecting ad fraud and preventing it within the entire customer journey from the first impression to post-click interactions. Here’s why- Impression Validation is not enough. Full funnel protection is a must as impression validation is not enough. It’s not a foolproof indicator of ad fraud. Here’s why: Bot-generated views and impressions: Bots can be programmed to simulate human behavior, including scrolling and pausing on pages, to ensure ads are “viewed.” These bots can inflate viewability rates without generating any real user engagement. Low-Quality Traffic: Even if a human views an ad, the traffic may come from low-quality sources like click farms or websites with minimal user engagement. These impressions may not lead to conversions or meaningful interactions. Click-Through Rates (CTR): While viewability indicates if an ad was seen, CTR measures if it was clicked on and engaged with. A high viewability rate and a low CTR can be a red flag for low-quality traffic or ad fraud. Low conversion rates: Ultimately, advertising aims to drive conversions, such as sales or sign-ups. A high viewability rate without corresponding conversion increases is always suspicious Data is limited Trackers easily bypassed by using Safe-Frames / iFrames Due to the huge volume of impressions, only sampling is executed but with limited time for analysis (~20ms). Limited data for analysis covering only IPs and user agents. Impressions are the easiest to spoof! Deeper Fraud Checks Fraud is not only inflated impressions. There are several ad techniques used by publishers such as ad pixel stuffing, domain spoofing, fake clicks, etc. A comprehensive validation process needs to be in place covering deterministic, behavioral, and heuristic checks for a multilayer approach to fraud prevention across the funnel. Full-funnel checks address these deeper issues to guarantee that the figures reflected in the campaign metrics translate to valuable interaction from the target audience. Combined Power of Click & Down the Funnel Analysis Embrace the power of click validation and ensure the click turn visits with genuine engagement.  Seek validation beyond those that bypass walled garden restrictions, and ensure a more reliable environment on advertiser’s own pages. For lower volume, allows census analysis and makes sure that more time is available to track user behavior patterns and generate genuine engagement.  Track bot patterns vs huma to detect sophisticated fraud like mouse movements and cover all campaign types with down-the-funnel analysis mFilterIt vs Competition – Pre-Bid Analysis vs Post-Bid Analysis There are several ad verification tools on the market. However, they differ in their effectiveness in providing ad verification services. This will examine the relative advantages for us against its competitors in both pre-bid and post-bid analyses. mFilterIt: A Full-Funnel Approach We detect fraud in post-bid analysis; thus, fraud detection is our strong suit. It employs techniques for the detection of fraud that reach beyond the most basic advertisement viewability measures. Impression Fraud Detection- We detect up to 15-20% fraud in campaigns. When it comes to validation at the impression level, the focus is on both real human impressions, impressions on Made-for-ad sites, and frequency cap violations. Also, viewability scores are measured to counter fraud throughout the life cycle of the campaign. Click Validation- Validate click with visit lead intent to check on campaign performance. Visit Intent Scoring is a must for improved channel management and retargeting campaigns Getting a lead is not enough to ensure a swift automated process in place for lead validation and lead quality assessment for setting priorities. Competition: A Narrow Focus on Viewability & Pre-Bid Validation Impression Fraud analysis is better at the post-bid stage than pre-bid, measuring performance beyond viewability metrics. In pre-bid analysis, i.e. before the ad is served, fraud can be identified based on only two parameters, IP and User Agents. Also, the time for analysis is limited to 10 milliseconds. This results in a meager 2% fraud identification. This is where a post-bid analysis trumps a pre-bid impression validation. Now that we have several more parameters fraud detection is done on deterministic and heuristic measures as well. This results in the detection of higher invalid impressions of 15-20%.  This results in improved ROI on Ad spending. Post-bid analysis is a more beneficial method for detecting ad fraud. As viewability is not a measure to detect fraud, most of our competition focuses on advertisers spending an average of 15% of their programmatic budget on MFA sites, but some may spend as much as 42%. While 35% of programmatic spending is wasted on low-value environments like MFA sites.   By focusing on robust ad fraud solution advertisers can combat the various forms of fraud that undermine their campaigns across digital advertising platforms. Prioritizing impression validation is essential for maximizing return on investment and maintaining trust in the advertising ecosystem. Understanding the Scope and Limitations of Industry Accreditations Limited Geography Some accreditations are largely limited to the US Market. However, competitors use these globally as a selling point. These accreditation bodies have recently come out to express their discontent with traffic validation platforms using it globally. Brands and agencies must check the geo-limitations of accreditations before onboarding the platform. Service-Specific Accreditation A part of these accreditations is granted on a service-by-service basis, rather than offering blanket accreditation for entire platforms. Each service or tool must be evaluated separately for its compliance with standards. Exclusion in Major Platforms Notably, brands must do a platform-wise analysis

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