mFilterIt Experts

Click Fraud & What to Look for in a Prevention Tool

Every day, brands are copied, misused, or manipulated online. But the real challenge is knowing which protection solution can actually stop it. With threats spreading across search engines, marketplaces, social platforms, messaging apps, and cloned websites, businesses need more than basic detection. They need clarity, speed, and precision. Our latest infographic, “A Quick Checklist to Choose the Right Brand Protection Solution,” breaks down the essential capabilities every modern solution must offer. This checklist highlights what actually makes a solution effective, from impact-based risk scoring and AI-driven discovery to removing false positives and enabling quick, automated takedowns. It also showcases how advanced platforms like Sentinel+ by mFilterIt combine OSINT intelligence, hybrid classification, and cross-platform enforcement to safeguard brands from impersonation, counterfeits, phishing pages, and deceptive listings. As digital risks continue to evolve, one question stands out: Is your brand protection partner equipped to detect threats before they turn into consumer harm or revenue loss? Download the infographic to explore the complete checklist and make an informed, secure choice. Download Submit

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Brand Bidding: Dos & Don’ts for Better Search Performance

Blog, Affiliate / mFilterIt Experts

What happens when someone searches for your brand and still doesn’t land on your webpage? Brand keywords sit at the most fragile point of your funnel: the moment earned intent turns into revenue. When users search with your brand keyword, they are not browsing, they are deciding. For marketers, this is the highest-intent traffic you will ever get, and how you handle it can make or break conversions, attribution, and overall search ROI. That’s where the dos and don’ts of brand bidding come in. Do it right, and brand keywords become a powerful lever. Do it wrong, and the damage is subtle but expensive. What you are going to see isn’t just a tactical checklist. It’s about discipline at the bottom of the funnel. Because when it comes to brand keywords, what you allow and what you don’t, decides whether intent turns into growth or quietly leaks away. That’s exactly what this blog is going to cover, highlighting: Who are responsible for brand keyword auction? What brands should do to improve brand keyword performance? What brands should not do to while navigating brand bidding checks? How to identify if your affiliate partners are bidding on brand keywords? How can you ensure long-term control over your brand keywords? Key Players in Brand Keyword Auctions Brand keywords are prime targets for anyone trying to steal your organic traffic. To protect your brand, focus on the three main players: Brand itself – To ensure they are seen when someone searches with their brand name. Competitors – It is a common norm of competitors bidding on brand keywords to be seen for the similar audience pool. Partners & affiliates – If affiliate partners bid on brand keywords, it is not ethical as they are paid commissions to bring unique visitors. Knowing these players helps brands take the next step, focusing on the essential actions and best practices (the do’s) needed to optimize and protect brand keyword performance. Do’s: How to Analyse Brand Keyword Performance Here’s what brands should keep in mind when reviewing brand keyword performance. Always Own Your Brand Keywords Owning your brand keywords is non-negotiable, even if you rank #1 organically. Brand campaigns give you full control over how your brand appears at the most critical moment of intent, your messaging, sitelinks, extensions, and landing pages. Without this control, competitors or resellers can define the narrative, intercept high-intent traffic, and dilute trust before users ever reach you. Monitor Who Else Is Bidding on Your Brand Brand keyword auctions are rarely exclusive. Competitors, affiliates, resellers, and even unknown third parties may bid on your brand terms, often appearing alongside or above your ads. Regular monitoring helps you understand who is present in the auction, how aggressive they are, and where brand leakage or policy violations may be occurring. Align Search and Affiliate Teams Brand keywords sit at the intersection of paid search and affiliate marketing, making alignment critical. Clear rules, shared performance metrics, and consistent communication between teams help prevent internal competition, inflated costs, and attribution conflicts. When teams operate in silos, brand efficiency suffers even when results appear strong on paper. Measure Incrementality, Not Just Conversions High conversion volumes on brand keywords don’t automatically mean high value. True performance comes from understanding incrementality, how much of that demand is genuinely driven by paid efforts. Evaluating new versus returning users, overlap with organic traffic, and assisted versus last-click conversions reveals whether brand spend is creating growth or simply capturing existing intent. Don’ts: What Weakens Brand Keyword Performance Here’s what many brands overlook and how it quietly weakens their brand keyword performance. Don’t Assume Brand Traffic Is Free Brand traffic may look inexpensive, but it’s never free. Every brand click carries a cost, and without active management, CPCs can quietly rise due to competition, inefficiencies, or poor structure. Treating brand campaigns as an afterthought often leads to inflated spend and missed opportunities to protect and optimize high-intent demand. Don’t Ignore Partner Brand Bidding Brand bidding in affiliate marketing isn’t always wrong if brand has stated the clear guidelines on which keywords are allowed for bidding. However, affiliate partners who bid intentionally or unintentionally on brand terms, and without clear rules or monitoring, this activity can inflate cost per click, distort attribution, and weaken true search efficiency. Controlled participation enables scale; unchecked bidding creates leakage. Don’t Rely Only on Last-Click Attribution With last-click attribution, credit often goes to partners who didn’t generate demand organically but simply intercepted it by diverting users through their own links. This masks the efforts that actually brought the user in and makes brand keyword performance look stronger than it truly is, while inflating the value of traffic that was never incremental. What to Do When Your Affiliate Partners Bid on Your Brand Keywords If partners are bidding on your brand keywords, you need to know and identify it. Here’s a stepwise guide for brands to detect brand bidding violations by dishonest affiliates: Step 1: Identify Which Affiliates Are Bidding Start by gaining visibility into which partners are bidding on your brand keywords. This includes understanding who they are, how often they appear, and where they show up in the auction. Without clarity on participation, brand control becomes guesswork. Step 2: Review Their Keywords, Ads, and Landing Pages Look closely at the exact keywords, partners are bidding on, the ad copy they are using, and where that traffic is being sent. Misaligned messaging, misleading offers, or unnecessary redirects can confuse users and weaken trust at the moment of search. Step3: Ask One Critical Question Evaluate whether the bidding activity is genuinely improving brand keyword performance or simply intercepting demand that would have reached you anyway. This distinction helps separate incremental value from inflated conversions. Step 4: Act Based on Impact Once performance is clear, decide the right approach and allow affiliate bidding with clear guardrails, restrict specific brand terms, or adjust commissions to reflect true contribution. How to Maintain Long-term Control Over Brand Keywords Long-term brand protection comes from governance not one-time fixes. Clear rules, visibility, and accountability keep brand keywords efficient and protected. Following guidelines enable brands to own the long-term control over their keywords – Set Clear Brand Keyword Guidelines Define who can bid on brand terms, which keywords are allowed, and how brand messaging should appear. Clear rules reduce confusion and prevent misuse across teams and partners. Monitor Brand Activity Regularly Brand auctions change fast, especially during sales and peak periods. Regular monitoring helps catch CPC spikes, new bidders, and compliance issues early. Share Ownership Across Teams Brand keyword performance spans search, affiliate, and partner teams. Shared accountability keeps costs controlled and goals aligned. Review

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Why Brand Safety on Video Platforms Will Matter More Than Ever in 2026

Blog, Brand Safety & Protection / mFilterIt Experts

In 2026, the biggest risk in video advertising won’t be unsafe content; it will be misplaced trust. Video has evolved into the most influential layer of the digital ecosystem, shaping brand identity and consumer perception at scale. According to a stat, 95% of the brands see video marketing as a crucial part of the overall strategy. It shapes how audiences discover brands, how narratives are framed, and how trust is built, and ultimately, brand reputation is built or eroded at scale. Unlike static formats, video does not exist in isolation. It creates an immersive environment where advertising, content, and emotion intersect. As brands increase their investments across short-form UGC content, long-form video, OTT, and connected TV, the line between content and advertising continues to blur. Viewers don’tcompartmentalize their experience. The content they consume and the ads they see are perceived as part of the same moment. This shift fundamentally raises the stakes for advertisers. Brand safety on video platforms is no longer just about avoiding obvious risks—it’s about ensuring that every placement aligns with how a brand wants to be seen. Heading into 2026, this alignment will directly influence brand trust, recall, and long-term equity. What we will cover in this blog: This blog explains why brand safety on video platforms will matter more than ever in 2026, why platform-level controls and keyword blocking are no longer enough, and what a modern, context-driven brand safety approach must account for, including contextual relevancy, placement quality, and audience perception, so advertisers can protect trust, relevance, and long-term brand value in a video-first world. The Real Brand Safety Problem on Video Platforms Brand safety challenges on video platforms are no longer isolated incidents. They directly impact brand reputation and consumer trust. They are the result of structural gaps in how content is classified, evaluated, and governed at scale. As video advertising grows more automated and decentralised, brands face a convergence of risks—many of which stem from outdated or incomplete approaches to brand safety. Standards Exist, but Enforcement Is Inconsistent Industry frameworks such as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) provide a shared baseline for defining content risk and suitability. These guidelines help brands, platforms, and agencies align on what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable environments. However, compliance with standards does not guarantee consistent enforcement. Video platforms interpret and apply these frameworks differently, often optimising for scale and monetisation. As a result, content that meets minimum standards may still be unsuitable for certain brands, categories, or markets. For advertisers, this creates a gap between policy-level compliance and real-world placement quality. Over-Reliance on Platform-Level Controls Most brands depend heavily on platform-provided brand safety settings and automated content blocking mechanisms. While necessary, these controls are limited. Platform-native solutions: Operate on broad, one-size-fits-all thresholds Lack visibility into placement-level decisioning Are not tailored to individual brand risk tolerance This creates a false sense of safety. Brands assume protection because controls are enabled, without truly understanding where ads are appearing or why. As video ecosystems expand, this reliance becomes a liability rather than a safeguard. Keyword Blocking Creates Blind Spots Keyword blocking remains one of the most widely used brand safety tactics—but it was never designed for video. Keywords cannot capture: Narrative intent Visual context Emotional tone or sentiment As a result, brands either block too aggressively and lose quality reach, or fail to block content that appears acceptable on paper but problematic in practice. In a video-first environment, over-reliance on content blocking increasingly works against brands rather than for them. Lack of Content-Level Evaluation Many brand safety decisions are still made based on metadata—titles, tags, and descriptions—rather than the content itself. This introduces risk in a video ecosystem where: Titles are optimised for clicks Descriptions may not reflect actual content Visual storytelling often contradicts text signals Without analysing the actual video—visuals, audio, on-screen text—brands lack a complete view of the environment their ads are associated with. Absence of Contextual and Sentiment Intelligence Most existing brand safety controls treat content as either safe or unsafe. This binary approach ignores context. Tone, framing, and sentiment play a critical role in how content is perceived. Ads placed next to emotionally charged, alarmist, or sensational content can inherit those cues—even if the content itself is technically compliant. Without contextual targeting and sentiment analysis, brands are exposed to subtle but significant perception risks. One-Size-Fits-All Global Frameworks Video platforms operate globally, but brand safety is deeply local. Cultural norms, language nuances, and regional sensitivities vary widely especially in markets like India, MENA, and South-East Asia. Tools designed for Western markets often fail to capture these nuances. Brands applying uniform global rules risk misalignment in local markets, where the impact of content can differ dramatically. Misclassification and Category-Level Risk Accurate content classification underpins brand safety. Yet misclassification remains common on video platforms. When content is incorrectly categorised, brands lose control over placement suitability—especially in sensitive categories such as children’s content, news, or regulated verticals. This not only creates reputational risk but also raises compliance and governance concerns. How do Brand Safety Measures Need to Evolve in 2026? With the digital ecosystem evolving rapidly and the threats increasing, brands need to be proactive with their safety measures. Brands need a modern brand safety solution to ensure they don’t miss any blindspots to non-transparency of ad placements. Content-Level Evaluation Must Replace Assumptions Brand safety frameworks must evolve from signal-based checks to content-level understanding. This means analyzing what is actually present in the video—visual elements, spoken language, on-screen text, and overall narrative flow. Relying on metadata alone introduces risk, as titles and descriptions can be optimized for discoverability rather than accuracy. Content-level evaluation provides a more reliable foundation for assessing suitability and risk. Contextual Suitability Will Matter More Than Binary Safety The concept of “safe” versus “unsafe” is no longer sufficient. A piece of content can meet platform safety standards while still being unsuitable for a particular brand, category, or campaign objective. Contextual suitability focuses on alignment—whether the environment reinforces or undermines brand messaging. In 2026, advertisers

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Why Do Travel Industry Campaigns Underperform Even When Metrics Look Strong?

Blog, Ad Fraud / mFilterIt Experts

As the global travel industry moves toward a projected US$1063.00bn market by 2028, competition for traveller demand has never been more intense. Airlines, OTAs, hotels, and travel apps are investing aggressively across digital channels to capture attention early, shape intent, and convert inspiration into bookings. To achieve this, travel industry typically run a mix of awareness campaigns to spark destination interest and performance campaigns to drive booking intent and improve the look-to-book ratio. Today, more than 78% of travel advertising budgets are allocated to digital ads, representing $7.73 billion in spend this year alone. However, there is a catch. Campaigns may appear healthy on the surface, a significant portion of this spend never reaches a real traveller or influences a genuine booking decision. What often goes unnoticed is what happens after a campaign goes live. Performance seems to perform well, but beneath the dashboards, early warning signals begin to emerge, signals that quietly erode efficiency, inflate results, and dilute real demand. By the time the impact is visible in bookings and revenue, the damage is already done. This raises critical questions for travel marketers: What hidden signals are affecting both awareness and performance campaigns? How do these issues distort demand and ROI? And most importantly, how can travel industry brands safeguard their campaigns before budget leakage turns into lost revenue? Signs Travel Industry Brands Must Not Overlook in Their Campaigns Travel brands run multiple campaigns without paying much heed to the signs that cause devastating impacts, directly hampering brand’s ROI. Sneak into these signs before they sneak in your campaigns – Sudden spikes in clicks Exorbitantly high clicks in your campaigns causing click fraud without any significant conversions. Impact – Your budget drains faster, performance looks better than it actually is, and attribution hijacking shifts credit to the wrong channels, leading to decisions based on false data, ads being pulled away from real travellers, and a direct drop in your search-to-book ratio. Read in detail about click fraud Artificially increased engagement High engagement from low-quality users who later uninstall the app. Impact – Campaigns show high clicks, installs, or interactions driven by low-quality or non-genuine users who uninstall the app shortly after, delivering no real retention, revenue, or long-term value, contributing to invalid traffic and hampering the lifetime value of travellers Read in detail about incent fraud Impressions generating from unexpected geographies Ads getting viewed from locations that were never your target on the first place. Impact – Impressions from unintended geographies lead to geotargeting fraud, causing wasted spend, diluted audience relevance, and misleading performance metrics that don’t translate into real demand or conversions. Abnormal promo code or loyalty point redemptions Unusual spikes or repeated redemptions indicate misuse of discounts or rewards, often through unauthorized sharing, automation, or expired codes. Impact – It leads to unearned discounts, direct revenue loss, distorted campaign results, and reduced value for genuine customers. Know more about how referral and coupon fraud exploit campaign performance Keyword bid price rising alarmingly Constant bidding on branded keywords by competitors or affiliates. Impact – When competitors repeatedly bid on your brand keywords, bid prices rise and their ads appear above your official site, diverting high-intent traffic, inflating acquisition costs, and quietly eroding the effectiveness of your campaigns. Read more about how brand bidding violations impact PPC campaigns Ads appearing on irrelevant or unsafe content Ads getting misplaced by fraudsters who manipulate systems using bots, spoofed domains, hidden ads, or fake apps. Impact – It causes wasted ad spend on non-human or low-intent traffic, inflated reach and engagement metrics, misleading attribution and ROAS. How Travel Industry Brands Can Safeguard Their Ad Campaigns For travel brands, protecting both brand reputation and campaign performance is critical. Awareness and performance campaigns rely on accurate signals, safe placements, and genuine user actions. While in-house monitoring can address some risks, it often falls short against sophisticated fraud tactics and scale-related challenges. This is why travel brands need a trusted and holistic ad fraud solution that validates traffic, ensure safe brand asset placements, and secures brands at all levels. mFilterIt brings a unified solution to safeguard travel campaigns end to end. Here’s what the comprehensive solutions includes – Fraud prevention across all stages (From viewing to purchasing) Maintains source-level transparency and validates traffic at every stage of the funnel, not just at the impression level, ensuring genuine engagement and conversions. Identifying safer, high-quality inventory Detects suspicious, inappropriate, and Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites and delivers placement-level visibility. This enables brands to proactively block unsafe environments and focus spend on premium, brand-safe, and contextually relevant inventory, ensuring ads appear only in suitable settings that protect brand reputation and drive meaningful engagement. Clean and accurate attribution Clearly identifies which channels and partners are driving real outcomes, enabling fair attribution and informed optimization decisions. Detection of brand bidding violations Actively identifies competitors or affiliates misusing brand keywords and bidding on branded terms, helping protect paid search performance. Real-time, customizable infringement alerts Provides instant alerts for potential violations or unauthorized brand usage, allowing teams to act quickly before issues escalate. Conclusion While your focus should be on scaling future campaigns and capturing the next wave of traveller demand, many brands are quietly losing efficiency in their current campaigns where they shouldn’t be. These leaks are rarely dramatic at first, but left unchecked, they compound over time. Hence, protecting your campaigns demands more than basic checks or surface-level metrics. With mFilterIt ad fraud solution – Valid8, travel industry brands gain a unified solution that goes deeper validating traffic quality, uncovering hidden risks, and ensuring media investments drive real traveller engagement and measurable business outcomes. So, your campaigns don’t just scale, they scale cleanly, safely, and sustainably. Want to know how? Contact us now FAQs What is click fraud in travel industry campaigns? Click fraud occurs when automated bots or low-intent users generate clicks that appear genuine but don’t lead to real conversions, inflating metrics and wasting ad spend. What is invalid traffic (IVT) and why does it matter? Invalid traffic refers to non-human or low-quality interactions that distort campaign performance, mislead optimization, and reduce ROI. What is programmatic fraud? Programmatic fraud manipulates automated ad buying to place ads in low-quality or non-human traffic sources, inflating costs without delivering real audience engagement.

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A Quick Checklist to Choose the Right Brand Protection Solution

Infographics / mFilterIt Experts

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How mFilterIt’s Full Funnel & Omnichannel Approach Helps Detect Advanced Ad Fraud?

Blog, Ad Fraud / mFilterIt Experts

Many marketers still view ad fraud from a linear lens. They think bots are easy to spot, and platforms flag it. However, this assumption is no longer true. Over the years, advertising has transformed into a deeply interconnected, automated, and omnichannel ecosystem. Brands no longer run isolated campaigns. They operate across open web, apps, platforms, affiliates, influencers, CTV, and ecommerce media simultaneously. With this scale comes complexity, and with complexity comes a new class of ad fraud. One that hides deep inside the user journey, behaviour, blends into engagement, and surfaces only after real business impact has already been compromised. This means ad fraud is no longer a traffic problem. It does not operate in straight line. It moves across channels, adapts to campaign objectives, and embeds itself deeper into the funnel—quietly influencing optimization, attribution, and budget decisions. Therefore, to protect campaigns, brands need ad fraud solutions that must follow the full campaign journey, across environments and down the entire funnel to detect ad fraud. This is precisely where mFilterIt’s advanced ad fraud solution is designed to operate. How Ad Fraud Has Evolved and Why Omnichannel Protection Is the Foundation of Modern Fraud Prevention Sophisticated invalid traffic is engineered to resemble genuine user behaviour. It mimics human interaction patterns, rotates devices, locations, and stays just below platform thresholds long enough to be considered legitimate. The goal is no longer just to generate fake clicks or installs; it is to influence how marketers optimize campaigns across multiple channels and platforms based on false data. As ad fraud evolved from a visible threat to a systemic risk, protection had to evolve as well, beyond basic checkpoints – invalid ad traffic validation, click fraud prevention, into continuous fullfunnel protection. At the same time, brands now run branding and performance campaigns simultaneously across web, app, programmatic, search, social, OTT/CTV, and affiliate ecosystems. In such a fragmented environment, fraud naturally migrates to the least protected channel. This makes omnichannel protection not a feature, but the foundation of effective, modern ad fraud prevention. mFilterIt’s Omnichannel Coverage: How Protection Works Across Campaigns and Channels mFilterIt uses an advanced approach for detection. Instead of treating channels in isolation, the ad fraud solution aligns the detection process with campaign intent, environment-specific risks, and user journey stages, powered by a unified intelligence layer across the ecosystem. Here’s how it works: Web Traffic Validation: Branding Campaigns – Protecting reach, visibility, and brand exposure Branding campaigns are often assumed to be low risk, as they are optimized based on CPM (impression) models and not for conversions. But in reality, they are highly vulnerable to fraud that drains budgets without triggering immediate alarms. Viewability, while widely used as a quality metric, is not a measure of authenticity. Bots and spoofed environments can easily generate viewable impressions that technically meet industry thresholds but are never seen by real users. At the same time, ads are frequently served on low-quality or made-for-ad environments where content exists solely to host ads, offering no real audience value. Moreover, when impressions are repeatedly served to the same users due to frequency cap violations, reach appears inflated while true exposure shrinks. In such scenarios, simply validatingimpression counts is not enough. Without deeper validation of where ads appear, how often they are served, and whether exposure is genuine, branding budgets risk optimizing for visibility metrics that look healthy but deliver minimal brand impact. Our ad fraud solution protects branding campaigns (display and video ad platforms) through the following layers: Viewability & Attention Metrics Measures whether ads are not just served, but meaningfully seen, ensuring brand exposure is real and not artificially inflated. Impression Traffic Validation Filters and blacklists non-genuine impressions generated by bots, automated scripts, abnormal environments, or invalid sources that distort reach and frequency. MFA (Made-For-Ad Sites) Detection Identifies and blocks low-quality inventory or publishers designed purely to monetize ads without real audience engagement. F-Caps (Frequency Cap Violation Detection) Prevents excessive repeat exposure to the same users, preserving true reach, avoiding ad fatigue, and improving campaign efficiency. Know how to improve ad engagement with attention metrics. Web Traffic Validation: Performance Campaigns – Protecting optimization, attribution, and lead quality Web performance campaigns are more sensitive to ad fraud. Platforms continuously learn from clicks, visits, and conversions to adjust bidding and budget allocation. But even if a small percentage of those clicks, visits, and leads are invalid or low intent, this can significantly distort learning algorithms, misguide bidding strategies, and inflate acquisition costs. mFilterIt’s ad fraud solution protects performance campaigns through: Click Traffic Validation Identifies and blocks automated, manipulated, or low-quality clicks before they influence bidding and optimization decisions. Visit & Lead Validation with Intent Scoring Differentiates genuine user journeys from low-intent or fraudulent visits based on behavioural and heuristic signals that inflate acquisition metrics. It also ensures accurate source attribution through post backs to improve downstream conversions. Lead Validation & Prioritization Filters and ranks leads based on intent, engagement, and historical performance before they enter CRMs, preventing sales and call-center teams from wasting effort on junk or invalid leads. Understand in detail how full funnel validation differs from click validation. App Traffic Validation – Protecting installs, engagement, events, and long-term app value App ecosystems present another unique level of mobile ad fraud risks because performance is measured far beyond the installs. Mobile campaigns rely heavily on post-install signals such as registrations, in-app events, retention, and purchases to optimize targeting and forecast lifetime value. Fraudsters exploit this dependency by generating fake installs, spoofed events, and incentivized activity that appears legitimate on the surface. These attacks inflate CPI, distort retention analysis, and mislead lifetime value forecasting, resulting in inaccurate campaign optimizations and attributions. mFilterIt’s ad fraud solution protects mobile campaigns through: Impression and Click Integrity Ensures interactions originate from real devices and legitimate environments, not emulators or scripted activity. Install and Visit Validation Confirms that installs and post-install actions reflect genuine user behaviour, not SDK spoofing or device farms, based on fraud signal and behavioural intelligence. Event Validation Verifies that in-app

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Why Is Influencer Monitoring Critical for Brand Trust?

Blog, Affiliate / mFilterIt Experts

People don’t buy from brands; people buy from people. And this shift in consumer mindset has led to the increase of brands inclining towards influencer marketing. Brands work with influencers to reach their audiences who already trust them and their content. But as influencer marketing grows, so do the challenges. Not every influencer uses that trust responsibly. Some take advantage of brand campaigns through misleading or fraudulent practices, which can impact performance and damage brand identity. For example, imagine a skincare brand launching a new serum through a group of influencers. Within days of the campaign going live, a few creators began promoting a “40% off” offer instead of the approved 20%, others used outdated product images they found online, and a couple even made claims the brand never endorsed. Soon, customers were confused, comments turned negative, and the brand’s messaging looked inconsistent across platforms. Situations like these are more common than brands expect—and they reinforce why active, real-time influencer monitoring is no longer optional. In this blog you will discover – Why influencer marketing is important for brands today When influencer marketing turns into exploitation Why influencer fraud is difficult to detect How mFilterIt helps brands monitor influencers effectively Why Influencer Marketing Holds So Much Power Today The rise of influencer marketing has made it a highly effective strategy for brands. Here’s why: Influencers have built strong trust with their audiences Influencers grow their communities through credibility and consistent engagement. This trust makes influencer marketing an effective way for brands to reach large, highly engaged audiences through a single, trusted voice. Creator recommendations feel more authentic than ads People follow creators because they value their opinions and recommendations. When influencers promote a product or service, it feels more like a personal suggestion than an advertisement, making brand messaging more believable and impactful. Influencer content blends naturally into social feeds Unlike traditional ads, influencer content fits seamlessly into everyday social media feeds. It also extends beyond an influencer’s followers, helping brands reach new audiences who may discover the content organically. Platforms algorithmically boost creator-led content Social platforms prioritize content that drives engagement and delivers value. Influencer-led content often benefits from this algorithmic boost, helping brands reach the right audience more effectively. When Influence Becomes Exploitation Influencer marketing is beneficial but only when influencers bring value in action. However, many influencers exploit the brand awareness campaigns in the following ways – IP violations Influencers may use brand assets such as logos, creatives, or messaging on unauthorized platforms or formats. These unauthorized uses can lead to intellectual property violations and raise questions around brand credibility and control. Typo-squatting Instead of driving new organic demand, some influencers create lookalike URLs that closely resemble official brand domains. This redirects traffic that would have reached the brand organically, misrepresenting true performance and inflating attribution. Brand bidding Influencers may bid on branded keywords and run paid ads to capture organic brand demand, causing brand bidding violations. As traffic flows through influencer tracking links, acquisition costs rise and bid prices increase, despite no incremental value being created. Brand misrepresentation Unapproved or inaccurate brand messaging such as false discount claims or misleading product information, can surface across influencer content. This leads to compliance risks and erodes consumer trust. Coupon code misuse Some influencers misuse promo codes through invalid offers, self-use, or counterfeit coupons. While these actions trigger commissions or discounts, they fail to attract new audiences or deliver genuine campaign value. Why Influencer Fraud Is Hard to Detect Influencer fraud is not an easy catch. With the evolving tactics, it becomes more critical to catch because basic monitoring cannot address the following questions – Are influencers reaching the intended audience? Reach is frequently inflated through fake followers or audience manipulation. While surface-level metrics may look strong, they fail to show whether the audience is real, relevant, or capable of driving genuine value. Is content aligned with brand guidelines? Influencer content exists outside controlled ad environments. Non-compliant or misleading posts can blend seamlessly into organic feeds, allowing brand guideline violations to go unnoticed at scale. Are commissions tied to genuine performance? Performance-based payouts are a prime target for abuse. Promo code exploitation and self-referrals can trigger commissions without real customer intent activities that traditional monitoring often misses. Know more about referral and coupon fraud How mFilterIt Enables Smarter Influencer Monitoring Influencer monitoring must be done on various parameters that holistically analyse the authenticity of influencers. A renowned electronics company implemented mFilterIt’s influencer monitoring solution, Effcent to evaluate if their influencer partnerships are driving true engagement to their campaigns or not. Here’s what our influencer monitoring includes Influencer Profile Analysis – Evaluates an influencer’s credibility using key indicators such as engagement rate, follower quality, and audience authenticity to determine whether a campaign will truly reach the intended audience. Influencer Posts Analysis – Assesses the quality and impact of influencer-created content by analysing likes, sentiment, and content relevance to gauge overall effectiveness. Influencer Followers Analysis – Uses a comprehensive 13-point checklist to assess audience quality, filter out fake or low-value followers, and deliver a composite score out of 30 that helps brands decide whether the influencer is worth investing in. Conclusion: Turning Influencer Marketing into a Controlled Growth Channel Influencer marketing continues to be one of the most powerful ways for brands to connect with audiences but only when it is built on transparency, accountability, and trust. This is where structured influencer monitoring becomes critical. By combining performance analysis, audience intelligence, compliance checks, and commission validation, brands can move from reactive detection to proactive control. For right influencer monitoring solution like mFilterIt’s Effcent becomes essential to monitor marketing more intelligently. Want to know how? Contact us now. FAQs What is influencer marketing? Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where brands partner with social media creators or influencers to promote products or services to their audience. What is influencer fraud? Influencer fraud refers to deceptive practices such as fake followers, inflated engagement, brand bidding, coupon misuse, or misrepresentation that distort campaign performance. How can influencer fraud

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How Ad Fraud Quietly Damages Your Bottom-Funnel Performance

Ad Fraud, Blog / mFilterIt Experts

Think of your funnel like a tower: the bottom is what holds everything together. If the base is weak, the entire structure becomes unstable, no matter how strong or beautifully designed the top floors are. Your bottom funnel works the same way. It’s the foundation of your growth, where real outcomes finally happen, purchases, sign-ups, subscriptions, and revenue. But when fraud creeps into this stage, the damage is far greater than just a few bad metrics. It shakes the entire system. A compromised BOFU means you are building success on numbers that don’t exist. And when the foundation is fake, everything that depends on it eventually falls apart. In this blog, you will discover – The two major BOFU fraud traps How click fraud distorts final conversions How incent fraud fakes success Warning signs your BOFU metrics are corrupted Steps to rebuild BOFU integrity Click Fraud: Fake Click Journeys That Mislead Optimization Click fraud is no longer just a top-funnel nuisance. Modern fraud networks simulate entire user journeys where the impact extends to bottom-funnel as well. The sophisticated kind of click fraud impacts bottom of the funnel metrics with the following fake clicks methods – Click Spamming When fraudsters fire multiple fake clicks often through device simulators or bulk click scripts, they clutter the system until a real user eventually installs the app. Because this happens within the attribution window, the system mistakenly credits the install in fraudster’s name. This click spamming skews your bottom-funnel metrics by turning genuine installs into “paid” conversions, inflating acquisition costs and hiding true organic performance. Click Injection Click injection is an advanced form of click fraud where a malicious app tracks when a real user is about to install another app and fires a perfectly timed fake click just moments before the install completes. Because the timing appears legitimate, the attribution system credits the fraudster for the install, corrupting bottom-funnel metrics and misleading optimization algorithms toward fraudulent sources—ultimately polluting the stage where real revenue and true performance should be measured. Impacts of Fake Clicks on Bottom of the Funnel Metrics Fake clicks severely damage the conversion stage due to the following impacts – Inflated CTR & Depressed Conversion Rates Fake clicks spike Click Through Rate (CTR) but never convert, making genuine add-to-cart, sign-up, app install, and purchase rates look significantly weaker. Budget Drain & Higher Cost-per-Activity Fraud wastes spend on non-human traffic, pushing up CPA and reducing the volume of real users who reach the bottom funnel. Polluted Retargeting Signals & Skewed Optimization Bots enter remarketing pools and send false engagement signals, causing ad platforms to optimize toward low-quality audiences. Distorted Attribution & Misleading Performance Metrics Click fraud manipulates what looks “effective,” misguiding decisions across channels, creatives, affiliates, and campaign strategy. Inaccurate ROAS Projections & Direct Revenue Loss With fake interactions replacing real intent, projected ROAS becomes unreliable, actual conversions drop, and long-term revenue suffers. Incent Fraud: Incent Traffic That Looks Real but Acts Fake Incentivized traffic, or incent traffic, happens when fraudsters run incentive campaigns to attract users by offering points, cash, discounts, or in-app currency for completing actions like clicking an ad, installing an app, or signing up. This creates incent fraud, where actions look real on paper but come with no genuine interest or long-term engagement. Incent walls, often seen in reward apps, fuel this by offering perks in exchange for installs or tasks. While incent traffic may seem like a quick way to boost numbers, it becomes a problem for advertisers who want quality users, because these “reward-driven” installs rarely convert, engage, or deliver true value. Common Methods of Incent Fraud Fraudulent affiliate cause incent fraud through following common methods – Sub-affiliate Routing Dishonest affiliates cause affiliate marketing fraud where they pass incent traffic through multiple sub-affiliates, so it looks “organic,” hiding the fact that users were rewarded to perform the action. Device Farms Workers install farms that repeatedly install/uninstall apps on many devices to mimic real users and generate fake conversions. Know more about device fraud damaging your ROAS Device Fingerprinting Manipulation Changing device IDs, IPs, or system parameters to make one device appear like multiple unique users, inflating installs or events. Proxy/VPN-Based Identity Masking Using proxies or VPNs to switch IP addresses so fraudsters can imitate traffic from different locations and avoid detection. Impact of Incent Fraud on Bottom of the Funnel Biased Engagement Metrics: Fake or uninterested users distort event-level KPIs (add-to-cart, sign-ups, purchases), making optimization harder. Wasted Retargeting Spend: You end up retargeting wrong users who never intended to convert, burning remarketing budgets. Misleading Attribution Signals: Incent traffic inflates lower-funnel events, causing attribution platforms to credit the wrong partners or campaigns. 5 Signs Your Bottom-Funnel Metrics Are Getting Polluted Top warning signs that brands can watch out to identify if their bottom of the funnel is getting polluted – CPA/CPI rising with no improvement in quality LTV tanking even though installs look strong Retention dropping sharply after Day 1 Events coming in “too perfectly” or unusually fast Top-performing sources delivering zero real revenue Algorithms optimizing toward partners that don’t scale How to Reclaim Your Bottom-Funnel Integrity To protect the lower funnel, brands need more than top-funnel detection. They need to shift from “Is this click valid” to “does this behavior make sense end to end?” Here comes mFilterIt’s Valid8, an ad fraud detection software that safeguard brands through – Click-to-install pattern analysis: Identifies abnormal click and install behaviors so you can spot fraud early and ensure only genuine installs are counted. Device identity integrity checks: Validates real devices and filters out spoofed, cloned, or manipulated ones, keeping your bottom-funnel data clean. Incent traffic classification: Separates organic users from incentive-driven ones, helping you protect quality and prevent inflated performance metrics. Uninstall velocity monitoring: Tracks how quickly users uninstall after installing, revealing fake, forced, or low-intent traffic instantly. End-to-end source clarity: Gives you full visibility into where each install, click, and event is coming from, removing blind spots in attribution. User intent scoring: Measures the true intent behind user actions, helping you prioritize high-quality users and reduce wasted spend. With the right ad traffic validation platform, marketers can finally distinguish between: Real users vs. scripted users Genuine conversions vs. incentivized behavior Authentic engagement vs. manipulated KPIs Legit installs vs. farmed installs Conclusion Your bottom of the funnel shapes everything that happens above it. If what flows into your top funnel is already polluted with fake users, invalid clicks, or low-intent traffic, your entire marketing engine starts making the wrong decisions. That’s why maintaining bottom-funnel hygiene isn’t optional—it’s the foundation of accurate attribution, reliable CAC, and meaningful conversions. Don’t let fraudulent activity dilute the results you’ve worked so hard to achieve. With the right ad fraud

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Affiliate Fraud in MENA: How to Protect Your Brand from Lead Generation Fraud

Ad Fraud, Blog / mFilterIt Experts

4,000 Leads. 18 Real Buyers. That’s the Problem. “More leads = more business” is one of the most expensive myths in affiliate marketing, especially in the MENA region. Affiliate campaigns promise scale, speed, and volume. Dashboards light up. Weekly reports look impressive. But when those leads hit your CRM, the reality is far less glamorous: duplicates, unreachable contacts, irrelevant users, and leads generated purely to meet affiliate targets, not to convert. Karim Bekka, Business Director at Assembly Global, shared a perfect example of how this gap plays out in the real world. A real estate brand demanded 4,000 leads every week. What they actually got? Just 18 genuinely qualified prospects. The rest clogged CRMs, wasted sales hours, and quietly eroded trust between marketing and revenue teams. This isn’t an isolated incident. As affiliate ecosystems in MENA scale, fraud and low-intent traffic scale with them. Incentivized sign-ups, lead recycling, form-filling bots, and publisher shortcuts are becoming more sophisticated—while many marketers are still optimizing for volume alone. The cost? Budgets spent on numbers that look good on reports but contribute nothing to pipeline or revenue. In this blog, we unpack the real risks behind affiliate lead generation fraud in the MENA region—and the must-have safeguards brands need to move from a volume-first mindset to a quality-led affiliate strategy that delivers leads your sales team actually wants to call. How Fake Leads and Cheap Lead Offers Increase the Risk of Affiliate Fraud in MENA Cheap leads are one of the biggest traps in affiliate marketing. Especially in competitive industries like real estate, fintech, education, insurance, etc., the promise of getting ‘leads in 3 dollars’ is the most common red flagof lead generation fraud by affiliates. Such claims always indicate low-intent traffic. Here’s how they do it: Fake lead submissions Affiliates recycle the same data, use automated bots, scripts, or employ click farms to produce volume. Duplicate leads Fraudsters submit the same lead multiple times using slight variations like different email formats, altered spelling, or the same user across multiple affiliate IDs. Click hijacking Affiliates steal last click attribution right before a real user completes an action, hijacking users that were actually driven by your paid, organic, or social campaigns. Event spoofing Fraudsters fake user actions like pageviews or form submissions, tricking marketers into believing signals that distort conversions and make campaigns look falsely successful. Bulk low-intent traffic Affiliates buy cheap, irrelevant traffic just to hit lead targets. These users have no interest in your brand, submit low-quality forms, and never convert into real customers. Coupon fraud Fraudsters may offer small rewards, cashbacks, coupons, or points to users for filling out forms to earn undeserved payouts. Moreover, brands unintentionally worsen this problem by using weak internal setups like: Using outdated SDKs unknowingly Leaving MMP fraud controls under configured Missing integrations between CRM, MMP, and affiliate tracking data The result? Unqualified, fake leads enter the dashboards, leading to wasted spend, efforts, misleading optimizations, and ineffective campaign efficiency. Why “Guaranteed ROI” Claims by Affiliates are Misleading in Lead Generation Campaigns The idea of ‘guaranteed ROI’ also seems promising, but in affiliate marketing, it’s completely misleading. As Karim Bekka mentions, affiliates can guarantee actions (clicks, impressions, form submissions, leads, installs), but they cannot guarantee outcomes (qualified appointments, conversions, or revenue). No affiliate partner controls user intent, brand trust, market maturity, or competitive context. Yet marketers in MENA frequently fall for these fake promises of guaranteed sales or predictable acquisition costs across every campaign. These are especially problematic for newer or low-traffic brands. Without adequate awareness and consideration built through mid-funnel channels, affiliates have nothing to work with. They may resort to aggressive discounting, incentivized traffic, or low-quality sources to meet guaranteed numbers of leads, further diluting brand value, and corrupting attribution data. Therefore, Bekka recommends brands to follow a staged funnel approach – invest first in awareness and consideration, then bring affiliates in at the lower funnel once there is brand demand and baseline volume. This approach ensures affiliates operate on top of real intent signals rather than generating irrelevant volume. By setting realistic expectations and aligning affiliate activity with brand maturity, marketers avoid costly inefficiencies and inflated performance metrics. Check out the full episode here How Brands Can Build a Fraud-Resilient Affiliate Lead Generation Ecosystem A sustainable affiliate strategy requires a balance of rigorous validation, selective partnerships, and a strong technology backbone. This approach blends operational discipline with the right layers of verification to create an affiliate marketing ecosystem built for quality, not lead generation fraud or inflated metrics. Here’s how it works: Lead scoring as a quality filter Lead scoring ensures that every submission is evaluated for completeness, behavioral relevance, intent, and device integrity. A simple (high, moderate, low) scoring system helps teams instantly separate high-value leads from noise. It allows marketing teams to optimize budgets, prioritize leads for sales, and maintain consistent quality benchmarks. Advanced ad fraud detection solution: Tracking, detection & human review Brands must leverage a combination of real-time tracking, multi-layer fraud detection, and manual analysis to run high-performing affiliate marketing campaigns. Key layers include: Visit-intent scoring to evaluate the quality of each visitor before they become a lead AI-based detection to identify unusual behavioral patterns Human-led investigations for nuanced or emerging fraud behavior Lead validation integrated directly into CRM to automate prioritization The ad fraud detection tool should track users across every step – from clicks to visits to leads and finally to sales, ensuring that only legitimate leads are forwarded to sales, lowering churn in CRM and protecting revenue. Build selective, vertical-specific affiliate networks Instead of onboarding dozens of broad-reach affiliates, brands should curate partners based on vertical expertise and verification ability. For real estate, this means affiliates with call centers or pre-qualification teams who verify user details before submission. For B2B, it means niche content partners or appointment-setting specialists that influence mid-to-bottom funnel outcomes, not just lead volume. Real-time blocking Fraud prevention isn’t only retrospective; it must be real-time. Brands should implement: IP & placement blacklisting to stop

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Ad Fraud Signals Your Attribution Platform Misses and How to Fix Them

Blog, Mobile Ad Fraud / mFilterIt Experts

If you’re running app campaigns at scale, you’ve probably seen this before. Your attribution reports look clean, installs are coming in, and your ad fraud detection tool shows no major issues—yet the overall quality of users doesn’t feel right. For app marketers, with fraud checks now bundled into most attribution platforms, it’s easy to assume traffic quality is covered. But these validations are mainly built to ensure installs are attributed correctly, not to deeply assess how users behave after they enter the app. And that’s where things start to drift. The challenge for marketers isn’t spotting obvious fraud anymore; it’s making sense of why validated traffic still underperforms. Cohorts don’t retain as expected. Conversions don’t scale the way spend does. Business impact feels weaker than what the top-line numbers suggest. In this blog, we cover: The key signs attribution platforms miss Impact of missed ad fraud signals on app campaigns How mFilterIt helps marketers to solve this Key Signs Your Current Tools Might Be Missing Manual and traditional monitoring tools overlook some serious ad fraud signs that lead to long-term impacts. Let’s understand each of them – Abnormal Click-to-Install Ratios Abnormal click-to-install ratios are one of the clearest signs that something is off. In our 8-day analysis, we saw an extremely high number of clicks but almost no installs, resulting in a CTIT of just 0.01% on 03-08-2025. Such unusual click patterns cannot happen with real users. It’s a strong indicator of bot activity, where automated systems continuously click on ads without ever converting, making it harder to detect. Spam + Bot Traffic Masquerading as Average Let’s take it a step further. We already saw high clicks with very few installs, but the conversion rate makes it even more suspicious. Out of all the installs, only a tiny fraction went on to make a purchase. For example, in one case with 170 million clicks and 249K installs, only 384 real orders were placed, resulting in a conversion rate of just 0.154%. This gap strongly suggests spam or bot traffic rather than genuine users that cannot be tracked with manual monitoring or traditional monitoring tools. Sudden Increase in Low-Value Orders There was a sudden and noticeable surge in low-revenue orders, which is a clear sign of arbitrage. This usually happens when dishonest affiliates pay users a small amount to place very cheap orders, just to make it look like their channel is driving sales. In reality, these orders are fake signals meant to earn them higher commissions. Bot Impressions at Odd Hours The graph shows impression rate on y-axis and hours on x-axis. As it indicates, impression rate surges exorbitantly at 3 am in night which cannot be a possible human activity. After observing the pattern of 10 consecutive days, it defines clearly that impression rate rises at night everyday hence indicating a huge bot or emulator involvement. What Happens When These Threats Go Unnoticed Attribution tools miss these sophisticated fraud patterns, allowing hidden ad fraud threats to slip through, ultimately causing the following impacts: Wasted ad spend on non-human or low-quality traffic The impact of the above threats is severe especially impacting your budget spend. Imagine you putting every stretch of budget in optimizing your resources to attract organic users. However, bots, emulators, or low-quality sources flood your campaigns. Over time, this wasted spend snowballs, pulling budget away from high-value channels and slowing down growth when it matters most. Inflated KPIs that distort optimization and scaling decisions Fraud-driven traffic artificially boosts campaign metrics like clicks, installs, CTRs, etc., creating an illusion of performance that leads to no conversions. When teams optimize or scale based on these inflated KPIs, campaigns drive in the wrong direction. This leads to misallocated budgets, misguided testing, and strategies built on numbers that don’t reflect real user behavior. Misattribution of conversions, hurting partner relationships When campaign metrics are inflated due to fake engagement by fraudulent sources, wrong partners get the credit. Authentic publishers or affiliates lose credit for the users they genuinely bring in, damaging trust and straining relationships. Over time, this misalignment makes teams second-guess which partners to scale or pause. Lower ROI and disrupted campaign performance When fake or low-quality traffic pollutes your funnel, your cost per outcome increases while real conversions stagnate. This directly erodes ROI and disrupts campaign efficiency. Fraud pushes teams to spend more to chase the same results, ultimately dragging down overall marketing profitability. Compromised long-term growth due to unreliable data Fraud doesn’t just distort today’s numbers, it corrupts the historical data you rely on for forecasting, budgeting, audience insights, and long-term strategy. When data integrity slips, so does decision quality. This creates a ripple effect: inaccurate models, misinformed planning, and slower growth across channels and quarters. How mFilterIt helps App Marketers Optimize their Campaigns? Advanced traffic validation solution like mFilterIt’s Valid8 fill the critical gaps left by manual and legacy monitoring, offering deeper protection and smarter insights. Here’s what right ad traffic solutions brings – Know Exactly Where Your Traffic Comes From With source-level transparency, gain a clear visibility into every source, sub-source, and placement. This helps you quickly spot unusual patterns, identify underperforming partners, and understand which channels actually drive real value. Catch Fraud the Moment It Happens Real-time alerts enable you stop suspicious clicks, installs, or spikes instantly before they drain budgets or skew your results. No waiting, no guessing. Verify If a Device Is Genuine With enormous bots and emulators hampering the performance metrics, advanced solutions check whether each device interacting with your ads is real, active, and human-driven. These checks filter out bots, emulators, cloned devices, and anything pretending to be a real user. Uncover Advanced Fraud Tactics With advanced ad fraud detection tools, go beyond basic red flags. Detect all the sophisticated fraud tactics like click flooding, install hijacking, etc. To outsmart tricks that are built to look “clean” but quietly damage performance. Way Ahead Indeed, digital advertising opens windows of opportunities for you, but it also opens the doors for fraudsters as well. While attribution tools are still helpful in surface-level analysis, they cannot simply outsmart the sophisticated fraud types. By implementing the right ad fraud detection tool, there will be visible impacts in the form of – Cleaner, High-Quality Traffic: Blocks bots, farms, and spoofed devices so only real users enter your funnel from the start. Better Campaign Performance: Removes fake activity to make accurate, decisioning sharper, and optimizations better. Higher ROAS, Lower Waste: Brings your budget to real users, reducing acquisition costs and improving returns across every channel. Improved Partner Transparency: Identifies quickly the underperforming or suspicious affiliates, networks, and publishers. Hence, the right ad fraud detection software is must for you to win the digital advertising game and continuing to win in the future. To know how

Ad Fraud Signals Your Attribution Platform Misses and How to Fix Them Read More »

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