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Major Indian Asset Management Company Enhances Digital Performance

Ad Fraud, Case Study / mFilterIt Experts

In the fast-paced and ever-evolving world of digital marketing, even major players sometimes find themselves grappling with challenges that seem insurmountable. This case study delves into the digital journey of a prominent asset management company in India, which was confronted with a trio of perplexing problems in its digital marketing campaigns. The client witnessed a dramatic reduction in wastage, resulting in significant cost savings. Wastage of ad spend was reduced by almost 60% and improved conversion rates DOWNLOAD FULL CASE STUDY (PDF) Submit REQUEST FREE AUDIT

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Decode the Fraud Series: Cracking Down on Click Spamming?

Leave a Comment / Ad Fraud, Blog / mFilterIt Experts

While online fraud perhaps started with email spamming, it has come a long way. Today, ad fraud takes many forms, and it costs digital advertisers several billion dollars. According to Statista Reports, within the 5 years between 2023 & 2028, the costs due to digital advertising fraud will increase from $88 billion to $172 billion. The lure of making quick money has motivated modern fraudsters to employ sophisticated techniques to commit fraud. Ad fraud techniques such as domain spoofing, cookie stuffing, ad stacking, ad injection, geo masking, and many others are just a few of the many techniques employed by modern fraudsters. Ad fraud is a serious problem that drains budgets and can cause long-term damage by skewing campaign performance data. Awareness is the first step for any advertiser looking to protect their ad campaigns and the budgets associated with them. This article will help you build this awareness. In the subsequent sections of this article, you will gain an in-depth understanding of one of the most prevalent click fraud techniques- click spamming. Let’s dive right in: What Is Click Spamming? Click spamming is a click fraud technique that involves the generation of fake clicks on ads or app download links. With click spamming, the clicks generated often come from genuine devices with authentic devices and user IDs. Click spamming can take many forms. Some of the most common ones are: Click Flooding- Fraudsters generate several fake clicks on ads within an app. Generating Fake Impressions- Fraudsters use a mobile app to generate fake views on videos in the background. The user is often unaware of this activity. In some cases, the app may place multiple ‘hidden’ ads within the ad interface and get credit for authentic impressions when a user views them. Organic Poaching- Fraudsters use malware-laced apps to claim credit for authentic app downloads. How Does Click Spamming Happen? Click spamming activity usually happens in one of the following two ways: Click Flooding and Generating Fake Impressions To execute this type of click fraud, the fraudster first places a utility app on the app download store. Examples of such apps may include a torch app or a calculator. However, this activity is not limited to utility apps and has been observed in games and other types of apps. Once a user has downloaded the app, it continues to run in the background. Without the knowledge of the user, the app’s in-built features generate automated clicks on ads. Similar techniques are used to generate impressions and views. Organic Poaching With organic poaching, the app downloaded by the user generates a number of clicks within the app. In some cases, it may be designed to enable an external device to click within the app. This goes on until the user downloads a promoted app or makes an in-app purchase. When they do, the credit is stolen by the fraudsters using organic poaching. While the obvious impact of such click fraud activities is the lost ad budget, there is a deeper, more serious problem. Click and impression fraud can distort advertisers’ analytics, compromising their ability to make informed decisions. Access to data, the ability to test different ads and audiences, and the ability to optimize campaigns are perhaps the most pressing reasons to use digital advertising. Click fraud prevents advertisers from enjoying the full benefits of this access to data and associated benefits. Difference Between Click Spamming and Botnet Activity Click spamming and botnet activity have a few similarities and are often confused with each other. Both involve generating a large number of clicks on mobile apps, mobile landing pages, and web pages. However, the key difference lies in the source of the clicks. How To Identify Click Spamming in Your Ad Campaigns? Click spamming can be difficult to detect. This is because the origin of the clicks is an authentic device with a genuine device ID. That said, detecting click spamming isn’t impossible. If your ads are receiving a lot of traffic from a source, but the conversion rate is unusually low, it may be a sign of click spamming. To be sure, you can: Look into the publisher app. If the app does not have a lot of downloads but is generating a disproportionate number of clicks, consider it a red flag. It is also worth watching out for apps that haven’t been validated by Google’s Play Store. However, do you remember that there may be some genuine apps that have chosen to forego the validation process to protect their code? If you suspect a conversion, check the time between a click and a conversion. In most cases of organic poaching, fraudsters claim a conversion sometime after the click has been generated. How To Stop Click Spamming? Once you have identified sources of fake clicks, you can simply block them. However, doing this at scale every day is often not practical or effective. Manually tracking click spamming activity can be time-consuming. Moreover, the process is prone to human errors that may lead you to overlook important sources of clicks. Similarly, in some cases, wrong judgment may lead advertisers to block genuine sources of authentic conversions. The most reliable way to fight click spamming is to use an ad fraud solution like mFilterIt. mFilterIt uses its AI and ML capabilities to pinpoint verified instances of click spamming and also identify human-like traffic sources. This paints a transparent picture of your campaign performance and allows you to block sources of fraudulent traffic. Conclusion Click spamming is a serious fraud issue, but the unfortunate reality is that it is not the only one. Click fraud and other forms of online ad fraud are plaguing ad budgets and campaign reports. While this means that some advertisers will continue to struggle, for smart advertisers, this presents an opportunity to get ahead. Think about it, simply by using an ad fraud tool, you can improve campaign performance and the accuracy of your attribution sources. Get in Touch to learn more about click spamming.

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Why Marketing Without Security Is A Serious Threat?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Advertising / mFilterIt Experts

Ad Fraud is not a term anymore that needs an introduction for marketers. There is frequent news about how fraudsters are evolving and stealing billions of dollars from marketers every year. As marketers are getting creative with their digital marketing efforts, fraudsters are also upgrading their fraud techniques. And as the fraudsters attempt to enter the new paid media realms like connected TV (CTV), the marketers have to become more vigilant. Meanwhile, the fraud security professionals have focused majorly on identity and payment fraud, the fraudsters have spread their horizons to trick the security professionals. They have evolved over time and came up with other forms of fraud methods like: Ecommerce Fraud Credential Stuffing Web Recon Malvertising Seeing the current threats from cybercriminals, it has become essential for marketers to collaborate with a holistic ad fraud detection and prevention solution. If you’re still not convinced, below we have covered the impact of ad fraud on vulnerable marketing and what is the solution. Impact of Ad Fraud on Vulnerable Marketing Lost Revenue: When the bots attack the marketing campaigns, an advertiser’s ad budget takes a toll. The advertisers are under the impression that their ad campaigns are attracting a load of traffic. However, the reality is that the traffic generated by bots is a waste. Even after investing a huge ad budget, the marketers neither get genuine traffic nor they are able to improve their ROI. Skewed Analytics: The success of an ad campaign is analyzed based on various metrics like site visits, clicks, and installs. However, when attacked by bots, these campaign data become skewed and give irrelevant data generated by bots from the campaign performance. This may further mislead the marketing teams into thinking their campaigns are performing well when in reality they are not. Poor Customer Experience: The brands attacked by the fraudsters do not just end up losing revenue, they have to deal with other problems related to the consumers. When the user clicks on a fraudulent ad, they have to incur problems like forced redirects or unauthorized malware installation. And, as a result, the consumer blames the brand for the inconvenience instead of considering it a fraudulent attack. Damage to Customer Trust: When a fraudster attacks a website or app, the consumer’s data is at risk. For instance, due to credential stuffing, the safety of the consumer’s account is compromised. The fraudsters hack their account to steal gift certificates and credit cards saved with the account. Furthermore, the brands lose time and money to invalid traffic while the genuine customers drift away upon feeling cheated. Holistic Way to Combat Ad Fraud Full-Funnel Model: For a marketing team, fraud detection must mean more than just eliminating fraud from ad campaigns. They must focus on other aspects like improved ROI and conversion rate along with cleaner traffic. To ensure this, the marketing team must focus on a full-funnel fraud detection model. This will help to eliminate the impact of sophisticated bots across the funnel. Real-Time Data Update: The marketing team must ensure to get real-time updates to take immediate action against ad fraud. With real-time ad fraud detection, marketers can optimize their ad campaigns before any serious loss. Due to real-time fraud detection, marketers can take an informed decision against fraudulent sources and protect their ad campaigns from the impact of fraud. Log-Level Data Analysis: To reduce false positives and take accurate measures against the sources of ad fraud, the marketers must have log-level data. By analyzing the log-level fraud data, the marketers can get an insight into the fraud sources, techniques, and how it is impacting their ad campaign. With the help of this detailed summary of fraud, marketers can take an informed decision for taking preventative actions. How mFilterIt can protect your marketing spends? To prevent wastage of ad spends on invalid traffic, our Ad Traffic Validation suite does deep checks to detect fraud at every stage of the sales funnel. Furthermore, our solution is equipped with features like real-time reporting and log-level fraud data. This helps the marketers to get a better understanding of how ad fraud has impacted their ad campaigns. Alongside this, we also ensure to do a transaction-level fraud analysis to detect fraudulent sources and blacklist them in real-time. Conclusion Ad fraud prevention is not a choice anymore for the marketing teams. No matter how much effort is given to optimize the ad campaigns, if the fraudsters manage to seep through the process, they can rip off all the ad spends. Thus, the marketing efforts must combine with a holistic ad fraud detection & prevention solution to ensure that the traffic coming on campaigns is – Clean Traffic AKA Real Humans. To ensure that your ad campaigns stay protected from ad fraud, get in touch with our ad fraud experts today!

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Click Integrity: A Solution to Combat Click Fraud in Acquisition Campaigns

Blog, Digital Advertising / mFilterIt Experts

A ‘Click’ is all that matters to begin a user’s journey on an app or a website. Click integrity is a component that essentially defines whether the click is legit or not. Click is a vital ‘attribution’ responsible for measuring the click-through rate (CTR) and an essential factor for ‘click-based’ campaigns. Click integrity is a pre-attribution check that helps block invalid clicks before they reach the MMPs, leading to bad installs. It also helps to reduce unnecessary click load on the Attribution Platform, thereby reducing the costs of Attribution Platform spending by Advertisers. So, it is a contributing factor towards saving on the marketing budget. However, fraudsters cannibalize a brand’s traffic, and the process is revocable through a few actionable measures. Furthermore, the invalid clicks pose the following implications: Implications of the Invalid Clicks Reliance on MMP Data The advertisers mostly rely on sources attributed through the MMPs. However, in the absence of a pre-MMP fraud detection mechanism, advertisers primarily depend upon MMP’s elementary fraud checks to ascertain the validity of a click. Having a single source for defining click integrity makes the advertiser more worried about campaign performance. Moreover, the assurance of the MMP doesn’t prove helpful because the sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) penetration is never caught. Untrustworthy Ecosystem Advertisers often mistake high-volume clicks to signify ‘amazing’ campaign performance/high CTR. However, upon reviewing the sources of ‘clicks,’ i.e., measuring click integrity, they often encounter ad fraud and inconsistencies. What happens next? The advertiser no longer trusts ad networks or affiliates and seeks alternative marketing strategies or advertising methods for acquiring users. The large-scale distrust of multiple advertisers directly impacts the overall ecosystem. ‘Double’ Payouts from Advertising Budget for Invalid Traffic Clicks are sourced to the MMP through multiple sources and activities. The advertisers make payouts to these sources. By the end of the day, the advertiser pays the ‘attribution’ cost on MMP and the ‘acquisition’ cost (CPC/CPI) to the source. Illegitimate sources steal the organic traffic and get paid for organically arrived users by firing fraudulent clicks. Does this make’ click integrity’ essential for you as an advertiser? So, what is happening behind damaged click integrity? To answer this, let’s go back to a more important question “What is the objective of the ad?” You’d get lower ad performance as an advertiser if you could not weed out the invalid clicks. Critical Indicators of Invalid Click Traffic Repeated/Multiple Clicks “Due to last-click attribution, fraudsters can easily capture the organic traffic by firing millions of repeated clicks in the background on a single device-id.” This means that a fraudulent source converts your organic traffic to inorganic traffic. The incrementality of these users in these cases will be ‘0’ as these would be coming from the source who has captured the last click Attribution, which essentially means that you are paying for your traffic. Click spamming skews the campaign performance and the advertising budgets as the fraudulent source gets paid for your organic traffic. The simplest way to identify click spamming would be to look at the CTIT and the Click to Install conversion ratio. Click-to-Install Time (CTIT): If you analyze the click-to-install pattern over a period, the CTIT curve would be a declining trend with 70-80% of the installs coming within the first few hours followed by a declining tail towards the end of the day. The time gap between click and install will not be very high for a standard traffic source. A typical user will click a source and then install an app. However, in an abnormal traffic source, you would see a large CTIT. It can’t be that a user clicked on an Ad, and installs are seen coming after a considerable gap or maybe after a day or even more. Click-to-Install Conversion Ratio (CVR): If the click-to-install conversion ratio is extremely low, i.e., less than <0.01% coming from a specific source/sub-source and sometimes more than that region’s population, this is a clear case of click spamming. Analyzing the Campaigns with anomalies like looking at long CTIT and an exceptionally high number of clicks with a scanty conversion rate of <0.01% CR is also not good enough!!! These clicks spamming should be blocked in real time to prevent organic traffic from converting to inorganic traffic. Invalid Devices Spurts of concentrated click traffic coming from invalid Make-Model, which don’t exist in the real world. The heavily correlated, linked clicks indicate that this behavior is identified and can be blocked in real time. This helps save the attribution cost as you weed out the bot devices. Invalid GEOs Proxies or VPNs are used to fake geographies. A high % of click penetration coming from a specific GEO location can be identified and blocked. IP Repetitions/Blacklisted IPs IP addresses are randomly allocated to users and are hobbled between users in a pool by Internet Service Providers. Extreme repetition or disproportionate IP addresses are generally not expected from clean traffic. However, Bots use servers, so spikes or clustering patterns are seen. The same IP addresses are repeatedly used across days for different SETS of device IDs. The IP addresses follow a pattern and sequence indicating fake clicks. These might come from VPNs, Proxies, Data Centres, or other sources. mFilterIt helps identify clicks coming from the blacklisted IPs and blocks the clicks coming from these blacklisted IPs in real time. Key Takeaways Based upon the integrity of the click, the click is sent either to the MMP for processing or gets rejected. It basically acts as a firewall for the install and post-install events and thus helps in weeding out the invalid clicks in real-time and thereby cleans the ecosystems. To conclude, click integrity filters invalid/malicious clicks from genuine clicks. mFilterIt (click fraud solution) helps the advertisers validate the click’s integrity and identify abnormal patterns such as repetitive behavior of Clicks, IPs and Device-IDs, Blacklisted IPs, Invalid Make-Models, and Invalid GEOs, which indicate BOTs and spamming behavior. Get in touch to learn more about the Click Integrity.

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Ad Fraud in Performance Vs. Brand Campaigns

Leave a Comment / Ad Traffic Validation, Blog / mFilterIt Experts

Digital Marketing spending is growing at a 9% CAGR globally, and digital media today has become a non-negotiable medium to reach out to consumers/audiences. For a marketer, the 2 obvious choices are to run either performance or brand campaigns to reach, act, convert, and engage with their target audience. While Performance campaigns are directly associated with results achieved, Brand campaigns’ focus is to ensure visibility and recall. Brand campaigns rely largely on viewability (impressions), while performance campaigns focus on down-the-funnel metrics. Performance marketing focuses on CPI, CPV, cost per sale, conversion rate, etc. on the other hand, the share of voice through mentions, sentiments, tags, etc., measures brand campaigns. Marketers and advertisers spend a large portion (>50%) of their digital advertising budget on these two campaigns. Our research suggests that it takes 6 to 8 impressions for someone to build a recall value of your brand. The regular reappearance of the brand ensures higher recognition of the solutions it offers. Viewability, according to IAB is, 50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for a continuous 1 second. For larger ads (those greater than 242,000 pixels), 30% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window. The same applies to video ads but for a minimum of two seconds. Ad viewability is the topmost layer of an ad metric. Fraudsters use fake impressions, bot impressions, ad stacking, and pixel stuffing for impression fraud. Meanwhile, performance campaigns work down the funnel and measure clicks, visits, events, and conversions. Clicks are important because they define the website traffic from online advertising. Visits account for the number of people who viewed the URL associated with the ad. Similarly, events could include installs, add-to carts, registrations, signups, conversions, etc. A close look at click-to-visit ratios and a visit-to-conversion ratio will give you the efficacy of your performance campaign. Cybercriminals impact these through click fraud, lead generation fraud, CPA fraud, influencer marketing fraud, cookie stuffing, click farms, and domain spoofing. The impact of ad fraud also influences programmatic, affiliate, and retargeting campaigns. The result of ad fraud is higher ad budgets, lower ROIs, diminished brand safety, fraudulent analytics, and infiltration of cybercriminals in customer data systems and ad servers. Ad Fraud in Brand Campaigns Impressions are the measure of brand recognition through online ad campaigns. Most digital brand advertisements are based on cost-per-mille (CPM), a.k.a., cost per thousand impressions. Total impressions determine the campaign cost in a CPM advert. The impressions also determine the reach of the advertising channel and total ad viewers in a specific channel. Ad fraud in impression-based campaigns happens when a fraudster opens a fake website, joins an ad exchange, loads ads on a fake website uses bots for page loading & impressions, and sells the impression inventory to the ad exchange. The common methods of impression fraud include the following: Pixel Stuffing Loading a 1×1 pixel ad on a page counts as an ad served but is not visible to the human eye. Ad Stacking Piling one ad on top of the other and keeping the original ad at the top. The impression counts for all ads, even when the top ad blocks ads below it. Fake Websites Using bad bots to generate impressions on fake websites created solely to sell inventory that does not have human visitations. Bot Inventory on Genuine Websites Fraudsters use bots to fulfill the “most required inventory” needs of the advertisers for acquiring credit and financial gain. Auto Impressions Running in-app ads (even on inactive apps) on mobile devices to auto-generate impressions. Determining ad fraud in impression-based campaigns is challenging because the analytics reveal more data than performance-oriented ads. You only have the option of comparing CTR with impressions. High impressions mean an advertisement has significant exposure. Typically, campaigns with high impressions experience a high click-through rate (CTR). Under the unlikely circumstance that you have low CTR and high impressions, the ad is possibly incurring fraudulent activity in the background. Businesses thinking that programmatic or retargeting can resolve issues about brand campaigns should know that it’s not true. Fraudsters have spoofed domains, penetrated customer data systems, and used bots to act as a target for remarketing lists. So, ad fraud is prevalent in brand campaigns. Furthermore, brands should optimize programmatic campaigns by incorporating inclusion lists consisting of URLs where the ads should be placed. This fear of programmatic ads landing on sites built for ad fraud has become a common affair. Fake websites distort the analytics of brand campaigns. The unexplainable ad impressions can only account for invalid traffic as only 36% of the online traffic is human. Moreover, sometimes programmatic campaigns declare results higher than the population of a location. So, ensuring that ads are delivered to humans is a serious concern. Ad Fraud in Performance Campaigns All marketers and advertisers rely on analytics for creating brand strategies. Infiltration of ad fraud into the data falsifies the results, gives false hopes, increases the marketing budget, and doesn’t reach a large proportion of the human audience. Popular researchers quote that ad fraud would exceed $50 billion by 2023. Moreover, nearly 40% of advertisers think that ad fraud is a significant downside of programmatic ads. For example, fake clicks display that the campaign achieved higher performance than expected, but in reality, engagements with bots will not bring home any business. Ad fraud is still happening even after optimizing the campaign with geolocation, remarketing lists, and pre-bid programmatic placements. Fraudsters use the following methods to target performance campaigns of brands: Click Spamming Executing clicks on behalf of real users without their consent in the background and claiming credit for obtaining financial gain from advertisers. Click Injection Using malware in apps to stay alert about “install broadcasts” and obtaining the last-click attribution through click firing before the new app installation. SDK Spoofing Tricking advertisers to believe that their ad will appear on premium apps, whereas it appears on fraudulent apps through SDK spoofing. Lead Generation Fraud Filling lead forms using real or fake user information with

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Ad Fraud Attacks on Gaming Apps

Ad Traffic Validation, Blog / mFilterIt Experts

Market research suggests that mobile gaming apps will witness a CAGR of 12.3% between 2021 and 2026. The increment is attributed to the boost in WFH conditions, increased smartphone users, and tech adoption over the last couple of years. The penetration of mobile games through social apps like Facebook has also contributed to the incremental rise in the installation of gaming apps. The continents with the highest gaming app adoption include North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. A NASSCOM study estimated that the potential of the Indian mobile gaming market would reach 628 million users in 2020. The key competitors in the mobile gaming market include Tencent Holdings Limited, Zynga, Activision Blizzard Inc, and many others. The rise in the adoption of gaming apps has increased mobile ad fraud. Our research reveals that less than 36% of the online traffic includes humans, whereas 64% includes good and bad bots. Mobile ad fraud is a technique used by fraudsters to target mobile advertising (bypassing mobile marketing funnels) for obtaining financial gain. Our research states that fraud in apps can range between 18% and 36% depending upon the type. These include click spamming, SDK spoofing, incent fraud, IP fraud, geo fraud, etc. However, these don’t account for the 45% of retargeting ad fraud in the industry. Fraudsters infiltrative apps to steal paid/organic user credits, trigger in-app events, display false event information, etc. Moreover, ad fraud in mobile apps also hampers brand safety. Elimination of mobile ad fraud is important for avoiding misattribution, losing the advertising budget to fraudsters, and building strategies around real-time analytics. 3 Types of Fraud in Gaming Apps ● CPA Fraud in App CPA models believe that quality users take action after installing the app. Advertisers use factors like tutorial completed, level reached, and in-app purchases to determine users’ lifetime value (LTV). The CPA model was adopted to diminish the install fraud rates. Unfortunately, fraudsters created SIVT or sophisticated invalid traffic to bypass fraud detection and crush in-app economies. Advertisers also generate revenue through in-app marketplaces and purchases. Freemium businesses also make revenue through in-app advertising. Advertisers make revenue based on cost-per-sale models created after analyzing premium users. Fraudsters use ad frauds to obtain the cost per action through in-app ads as the fixed percentages or rates provide high payouts. CPA campaigns are believed to be robust as they deter ad fraud because the general notion assumes that it is difficult to replicate in-app user behavior as compared to faking an install. Unfortunately, the bad actors are far smarter than that. The fraudsters not only use bots to create in-app events, but they go a step further and steal credentials such as account info, and credit details of real users (both organic and paid) who are likely to be far more active within the app. ● Attribution Hijacking Publishers commonly work with attribution models for tracking events like installs, purchases, link clicks, etc. The fraudster acquires credit for the first/last click before the event, commonly installed in gaming apps. By doing so, fraudsters obtain revenue from advertisers in exchange for the fraud credits. The method affects organic and inorganic users equally. Install hijacking is commonly practiced by injecting false referrals or delivering false click reports. Users who click on an install app are redirected to the Play Store, and whenever the user installs the app on the Android device, the other apps are alerted through Standard Android Broadcast. Any malware installed through another app installation is triggered and builds a fake click report with install attribution towards the partner, even though it came from a media partner. Attribution hijacking is commonly witnessed in retargeting campaigns. ● SDK Hacking/AKA Spoofing Another fraud that happens through existing malware in user devices through app installation is SDK hacking. This bot fraud spoof installs by tricking servers and providing monetary gain to cybercriminals. Brands using open-source technology or poor encryption should know that fraudsters use these loopholes for manipulating or reverse-engineering attribution codes. Besides installs, SDK spoofing can even tamper with clicks and other engagement signals. Identifying SDK spoofs requires tracking unused SDKs, watching out for install frauds, and generating a report for fraud exposure. The best methods to avoid AKA spoofing are avoiding open source SDKs, ensuring secure communication between SDKs and servers, detecting behavioral anomalies, and using a solution for bot detection. One of the largest drawbacks of mobile ad fraud is account takeover (ATO). It has led to implications like cyberbullying of children, loss of money, and data privacy breaches. Moreover, ATO attacks on apps can reward a fraudster instead of a professional with tournament entries and awards. ATO attacks also cause brand infringements, tarnish a brand’s reputation, and flush goodies out of inactive accounts. Conclusion The presence of ad fraud in the mobile advertising domain is causing serious grievances for advertisers and marketers. Brands should eliminate ad fraud by building marketing strategies with real analytics, saving dollars on spending, and acquiring real conversions. Combating ad fraud and ensuring brand safety requires a 360-degree solution with specialists available around the clock. Moreover, the ad fraud solution should have AI and ML capabilities to detect SIVT, analyze anomalies, and scan the web for brand infringement. By incorporating such a technology, brands can ensure a safer digital ecosystem, ad servers, and systems for managing consumer data. Get in touch to learn more about the Ad fraud attacks.

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Top 3 Reasons to Invest in Programmatic Advertising for FMCG Brands

Blog, Digital Advertising / mFilterIt Experts

We’re all living in times of pandemic, with the virus having a palpable impact on consumer behavior, media houses, agencies, and businesses alike. Marketing strategies and planning which seemed relevant two weeks ago may come off as jarring today. Marketers cannot simply ‘set-it-and-forget-it’. It has become more critical for brands to interact with their audience in innovative and non-intrusive ways. There are only a few channels available at a brand’s disposal to communicate with its audience in the current times. Not only this, the messaging and the creative design have to be structured in a way that maintains a healthy balance between ‘brand recall’ and does not appear to capitalize on the global pandemic. The solution is to adopt new technology with Programmatic advertising topping the charts. One such technology puts the control of spending in the hands of the marketer/advertiser. Businesses ranging from large enterprises to SMBs have wide adoption and an increased appetite for data-driven strategies, thus paving a successful growth and optimism for programmatic advertising. They are using the platforms more frequently to reach consumers who spend more time inside and online. Programmatic advertising has become the proven tool to garner customers’ increased engagement and awareness for FMCG brands. Personalization is the word of the decade, leveraging programmatic data; brands can use these data points to generate highly personalized content for their consumers. For FMCG brands, it is all about catering to consumers’ interests and affinities. Having laid the foundation, let us move on to understand further the top 3 reasons to invest in programmatic advertising: Relevant and Contextual ad settings A significant chunk of the population uses ad-blocking tools to avoid being bombarded with unwanted and repetitive ads. Offers that long expired; adverts that serve no purpose to the user, event passes that have already been bought, and many more such advertising cases are rampant, thus neglecting a consumer’s privacy (ultimately making them lose trust in the brand). In the case of programmatic advertising, the platform uses CRM and customer loyalty data to increase relevance, thus ensuring that the ad reaches the intended audience. Using native ads to create a positive experience for a user mimics the look and feel of the web page, thus bringing contextual alignment to the ad being served. Ads served in a Brand Safe Environment. Brand safety has lately become a topic of discussion on a global scale. A primary concern and a nightmare for brand managers, they have to constantly be wary that their ads are not displayed next to objectionable or offensive material that can compromise the brand. Programmatic advertising helps in reducing the likelihood of such instances and keeps a check on the ad being shown at unwanted places, thus increasing brand safety. The platforms have specialized teams to screen ad inventory and remove objectionable ones. Ad-Fraud Reduction Ad fraud has been a challenge that haunts businesses and marketers alike. A significant chunk of display ads is lost to unwanted and invalid traffic, thus wasting the ad budget. In India, where advertising is a significant industry, the ad-fraud rate is even higher. Investing in programmatic advertising helps eliminate ad fraud cases by giving the publisher complete control on the targeting parameters such as geography, interest, audience, etc. The platform can also block bots and other types of fraud, thus reducing budget wastage and giving value-driven and focused results. Programmatic advertising does not eliminate ad fraud because the platform makes a decision (based on several predefined criteria) in less than a second. Since humans cannot monitor such a rapid decision-making process in real-time, such campaigns may be susceptible to ad fraud. But programmatic advertising becomes the go-to choice vis-à-vis traditional advertising to reduce the possibility of fraud. With the recent announcement of Third-party cookies exiting, programmatic advertising will inherently see advancements in technology, become more sophisticated, a shift in ways the audience is targeted, and brands are getting more innovative to ensure transparency with the consumer by seeking effective and efficient solutions to interpret online consumer behavior better. This being said, programmatic advertising is the future of digital marketing to ensure optimum budget utilization and enable a data-driven automated approach to marketing.

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Brand Infringement Increases the Risk of Account Takeover Fraud

Blog, Brand Safety & Protection / mFilterIt Experts

Fraudsters create fake ‘look alike’ websites to capture data of subscribers/users to capture data for Account Takeover fraud. In a recent monitoring scan for one of the leading e-commerce portals, we found more than 30 fake websites (in this case marketplaces) created to fraud genuine subscribers/users which potentially increases the risk of Account Takeover fraud. This technique is increasingly becoming widespread where an ordinary digital user falls into the trap and hands over critical information to a scamster who misuses it. How does it work? A fake marketplace is created using exact elements of the genuine one making it difficult for an average digital user to make any distinction and become suspicious. The fake marketplace has the same logo, color scheme, fonts, listing style, and even the same product details to make a user believe that it is the authentic one. Since over 85% of users access the internet using a smartphone, the complete URL address is hidden as mobile browsers do not have space to show the complete link name. The fraudsters typo squatting the URL name so that a user is confused and there is nothing to doubt. After the fake marketplace opens in the browser, the user is allured to sign in or fill up a form to avail of great deals, enter into a competition, etc. The user taking things at face value enters the details and starts dreaming about the reward promised. Meanwhile, the fraudster celebrates by getting all the details which include password, mobile number, and other account information shared over this infringed identity. Now it can log into the genuine account and also change critical information like mobile number and email linked to the account. Now the account is completely in control of the fraudster who can buy products, possibly also use money in wallets linked to the account, redeem points earned, and much more. At times, especially in the case of OTT accounts, the fraudster can simply share the account details for other devices. All this would be happening in the name of a genuine customer, who will get no alert as all the mediums have been reconfigured. What does it result in? One can understand that due to Account Takeover fraud, the personal details of a genuine user are compromised, and the fraudster can ‘enjoy’ the benefits of a subscriber/user without becoming one. This is itself very damaging. But what does it translate into? Here are some of the implications of an account takeover fraud. First and foremost is the financial loss which can happen in many ways to both the parties – subscribers as well as the marketplace/platform offering services and products. The subscribers’ existing balances could be used to make purchases, etc. Nowadays, many platforms are offering a pay-later option. This would increase the liability of a user without actually buying anything. Hence, the transactions would turn out to be disputed where either or both the parties will lose money. The second major issue is a breach of trust and privacy. A user shares very crucial information including card details, passwords, etc., with a platform in all trust and faith. While the user is at fault for not perhaps being extra cautious, it’s primarily the duty of the platform that it doesn’t get infringed. The data could be abused as a scamster would get to know a lot about the behavior and profile of a user by checking the transaction history. Imagine someone buying an airline ticket for a particular city, and then receiving a call about being offered services while in that city. The user may feel excited that some AI-powered application is proactively offering the best of the experience. But it could be a scammer duping of money in the name of advance booking of any service typically required while traveling to another city. The marketplace will also face serious credibility and reputation issues resulting in paying subscribers signing off from it. Even a subscriber who may be spending just Rs 1,000 pm with the marketplace, would result in a substantial LTV loss by disengaging. This means a perpetual opportunity loss. As growth continues to drive from non-metro cities and towns which has been repeatedly shown as a trend by all major eCommerce marketplaces in the country, it is highly likely that the awareness about such issues will be next to negligible. This could be easily trapped by the fraudsters. Even the regulators cannot shy away by running very ineffective campaigns to increase awareness about such scams. The regulator and the cybercrime apparatus have also become effective and more proactive in their stance where such frauds become difficult to thrive. We have seen in cases like unauthorized card swipes, etc., banks do not take responsibility and shed off by excusing behind the awareness drives and ‘buyer beware’ principles. Brands (marketplaces) that are concerned for their reputation need to proactively create multiple layers of protection where brand infringement becomes almost impossible. This will result in users only engaging with the real platform where information exchange and transactions can be done without any worry. Are you unsure of any brand infringement case about your marketplace or other consumer-facing digital assets? Connect with us today and we will help you get the right picture.

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