It’s almost September, and the sale season is on!
The users are eagerly waiting to buy from their favorite brands. And the brand increases their spends to ensure they are visible to their relevant set of audience.
And amidst this excitement, there are fraudsters too who are excited to see the ad spends increasing and ready to make the most out of it.
However, there are some roadblocks brands face while trying to navigate the digital landscape seamlessly. Because running an ecommerce business is not just about running sales during festivals and tracking your buy box position, it’s also about protecting your brand from any kind of potential digital threats like ad fraud, brand infringements, unsafe ad placements, and more.
All these factors, when taken care of, together contribute to a brand’s financial growth.
That is why, to build trust and transparency across the funnel, every brand needs third-party ad fraud detection and analytics tools offering festive season market intelligence to enable real-time monitoring and flag off suspicious activities harming ad campaigns during the festive season.
Let’s explore what challenges this festive season holds for brands and what they can do to safeguard their brand and optimize performance during the season and beyond.
Challenges for E-commerce Brands During Festive Season
While the festive season brings unmatched opportunities for sales, it also amplifies the challenges for e-commerce brands. Brands are supposed to navigate multiple hurdles to truly make high profits during the festive season. Here are some major challenges brands face:
1. Protecting Your Brand from Ad Fraud
Advertising campaigns peak during festive times, and ad fraud is one of the critical threats to brands. While on one side, performance marketers are all ready to utilize their budgets to the optimum, on the other end, fraudsters are also all set to siphon off budgets using manipulative web and mobile ad fraud techniques.
They use sophisticated ad fraud techniques like click injection, ad stacking, impression fraud, domain spoofing, ad stacking, etc. that go unnoticed to the human eye.
According to a report by ANA, 56.1% of ad spends do not reach the intended consumers and could be wasted due to ad fraud and other pipeline issues in terms of media purchases.
Some major consequences of ad fraud include:
- Wastage of budget due to invalid traffic – Bots, click farms, and fake install activities consume ad spends, inflating metrics without adding any real value to the campaign performance.
- Low quality leads in case of web campaigns – Fraudsters deploy bots to fill lead forms in bulk using fake details only to manipulate the overall campaign metrics, leading marketers to make further decisions based on irrelevant data.
- Low retention rate in case of mobile campaigns – When most of the downloads are fake or incentivized, it directly impacts lifetime customer value, as users are not interested in the app, and only came in for incentives.
- High competition for placements – Rise in CPCs and CPMs during the festive season makes it even harder for brands to maintain visibility without overspending, resulting in significant wastage of budget.
- Lack of data-driven optimization – Campaigns that aren’t continuously monitored and optimized often miss quick-win opportunities. In a high-stakes festive environment, a few hours of inefficiency can mean thousands lost.
2. Monitoring the Digital Shelf Across Ecommerce Landscape
Winning the digital shelf is as important as keeping a check on fraudulent activities. This requires actionable data points, competitive analytics, and ecommerce intelligence across platforms.
However, with a range of products distributed across geographies, and the continuous growth of ecommerce businesses and new competitors emerging at a scale, brands face some major challenges like:
- Discoverability on digital shelf – With hundreds of brands bidding on the same keywords, being discoverable and visible on the digital shelf is tougher. If your products don’t rank in the first few scrolls, you risk being invisible to festive shoppers.
- Out of stock issues – If your product goes out of stock today and you realize it after two days, you not only lose immediate sales, but also divert customers directly to competitors offering similar alternatives.
- Mismatched content across platforms – Poorly optimized product titles, descriptions, or images reduce discoverability in searches. Even if customers find your products, inconsistent content can hurt trust and conversions.
- Price Undercutting and Discount Violations – Unauthorized sellers slash prices or violate MAP policies, hurting brand value and disrupting pricing strategies. If left unchecked, this not only confuses customers but also impacts ongoing campaigns. Moreover, you also risk falling behind, losing share of shelf without monitoring competitor pricing strategies.
3. Ensuring Brand Safety with Contextual Relevancy
Festive campaigns are often run on a massive scale to gain as much visibility and reach as possible. However, when campaigns run across various platforms, publishers, and networks, brands often risk being vulnerable to unsafe or irrelevant ad placements that harm credibility and form negative perceptions among the audience. Some challenges include:
- Ads get placed beside harmful content – Festive ads appearing alongside controversial, sensitive, or inappropriate content result in damaged brand reputation and distrust among customers.
- Lack of visibility – Ads that don’t match the surrounding content appear irrelevant, leading to wasted impressions and poor user engagement. Brands are most of the time unaware of these situations, leading to poor decision-making.
- Association with fraudulent publishers – Partnerships with shady or fraudulent publishers during peak season can harm both performance and brand trust.
- Regional Sensitivity Issues – A message that works in one region might backfire in another if not aligned with cultural or religious sensitivities.
4. Ensuring Brand Protection Across Open Platforms
Festive seasons aren’t just attractive to shoppers; they’re also the best time for fraudsters to set up fake websites or fake social media channels, using trademark assets of known brands to sell counterfeit products. This not only impacts sales of a brand but also creates confusion among consumers, harming brand integrity and reputation. Major challenges are:
- Fake Websites and apps – Fraudsters create lookalike domains or unauthorized apps, tricking customers into making payments or sharing personal details.
- Trademark infringement & counterfeit products – Fake or low-quality products flood online marketplaces during festive season, misleading customers using lookalike brand assets, keywords, and logos, to buy counterfeit products, resulting in complaints, returns, and a decline in brand credibility.
- Social media scams – Fraudsters set up fake handles or run paid ads on social media with festive offers, tricking shoppers into clicking on malicious links or making payments. These scams erode trust and divert genuine customers away from your brand.
5. Ad Transparency in Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Fraud Detection
Affiliate marketing is another growth channel for brands during the festive season, but also vulnerable to affiliate fraud. Fraudulent affiliates often take advantage of the festive surge to manipulate attribution and claim payouts. Here’s how:
- Click injection and cookie stuffing – Fraudulent affiliates hijack attribution by injecting fake clicks or dropping cookies just before a conversion. This tricks systems into crediting them for organic or paid sales they never actually generated.
- Incentivized traffic misrepresentation – Affiliates attract users with cashback, coupons, or rewards that look promising but don’t build real customer loyalty. Shoppers who convert once disappear inflating costs without sustainable value.
- Fake leads and conversions – Using bots, scripts, or fabricated data, affiliates submit fake signups and conversions. Brands end up paying for worthless leads that never convert into real customers or revenue, leading to poor decision-making and campaign optimizations.
- Unverified partner ecosystem – With dozens of affiliates active during festive sales, brands often lack visibility into who’s genuine. This blind spot allows bad actors to blend in, manipulate attribution, and drain budgets without noticing.
How mFilterIt Helps Optimize Performance Across Your Digital Journey?
Brands can navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, optimize their marketing efforts, and protect their brand integrity during the festive season and beyond using advanced AI-ML based brand protection, ad traffic validation, and brand safety tools.
Here’s how mFilterIt helps:
1. AI-ML Powered Ad Fraud Detection
Our ad fraud detection tool uses advanced AI and ML models trained on massive datasets to proactively detect fraud patterns. These models go beyond simple referral URLs or IP checks by analyzing 70–80+ parameters like device type, session behavior, ad viewability, engagement signals, attention metrics, etc.
It works on JavaScript and VAST tags, capturing granular-level insights such as visibility, browser details, device, geography, and user interaction details. This creates a multi-layered fraud protection layer that continuously evolves to identify both known and emerging fraud tactics. Unlike reactive detection, mFilterIt actively blocks anomalies proactively, ensuring campaigns run only on authentic, verified traffic sources.
2. Proactive Blacklisting & Post Back Blocking
Stopping fraud after it happens is too late because budgets are already drained. mFilterIt enables proactive post-back blocking, preventing fraudulent events from reaching attribution platforms. This helps avoid payouts to fraudulent affiliates. By seamlessly integrating with MMPs and ad platforms, invalid conversions are flagged and blocked at the source.
This way, marketers gain complete visibility into which affiliates, or sub-publishers, are generating fake activity, enabling swift blacklisting of bad actors. This active defense mechanism ensures money is spent only on high-quality traffic while cutting off fraud at its root.
3. Full-Funnel Protection
Fraud never stops at one stage. At mFilterIt, we provide full-funnel protection covering impressions, clicks, installs, registrations, and in-app or web events. Our ad fraud detection tool validates MMP data, install sources, and event triggers for app campaigns, while tracking browser behavior, form fills, and conversion signals for web campaigns.
This end-to-end monitoring helps detect anomalies like click spamming, fake installs, or fabricated sign-ups that traditional tools often miss. By ensuring every touchpoint is verified, marketers gain cleaner data, better optimization opportunities, and complete confidence in measuring campaign effectiveness and true ROI.
4. Omnichannel Coverage
Fraudsters don’t operate in silos, and neither should your protection. mFilterIt’s solution offers omnichannel coverage across mobile apps, web, OTT, CTV, and affiliate networks. Whether you’re running large-scale ecommerce campaigns, targeted app promotions, or multi-market festive activations, our unified platform monitors traffic integrity across every channel.
By consolidating fraud signals into one central view, brands can eliminate blind spots and ensure consistency in campaign quality. This holistic coverage ensures that fraudulent activity is blocked regardless of where it originates, further helping marketers in right campaign optimization, performance monitoring, and reduced budget wastage.
5. Brand Safety
mFilterIt integrates brand safety mechanisms alongside fraud detection to ensure your ads never appear on harmful, inappropriate, or non-contextual content. Using contextual analysis, sentiment checks, and content intelligence, we monitor ad placements across digital environments and block those misaligned with your brand values.
Our solution also verifies content based on regional nuances and local context to prevent cultural or regional misplacements. Together, this keeps your campaigns effective, ethically aligned, and reputation safe across every touchpoint.
6. Brand Protection Against Infringement & Impersonation
During high-traffic periods like festive season, fraudsters exploit brand trust using fake websites, lookalike ads, counterfeit products, social media impersonation, and trademark infringements.
Our advanced protection solution continuously scans the digital ecosystem using open-source intelligence to detect and take down fake websites, accounts, etc. By monitoring brand keyword bidding, fake domains, unauthorized sellers, and phishing attempts, our solution safeguards both brand reputation and consumer trust, ensuring that shoppers only engage with authentic brand assets.
7. Competitive Ecommerce Analytics & Digital Shelf Monitoring
Winning festive sales is not just about being present online, but about being visible and discoverable at the right place and time. With advanced digital shelf monitoring, brands can track their share of shelf across platforms and categories to understand how their products perform against competitors.
Moreover, by analyzing keyword performance, search rankings, and inventory gaps, brands can uncover why certain products are being discovered more often than others and ensure proactive replenishment. These actionable insights help optimize product titles, descriptions, and placements, ensuring consistent visibility, stronger shopper recall, and higher conversions during peak demand periods.
Final Thoughts
The festive season is the biggest opportunity for brands to get more ROI. However, without the right tech stack in place, many ecommerce brands lose the opportunity to make the most of their efforts during the festive season.
Don’t let fraudsters ruin the festive season, or any season beyond. Move to proactive protection from reactive fixes using advanced ad fraud detection, brand safety monitoring, proactive brand protection, and ecommerce intelligence solution,
Don’t let hidden threats eat into your festive profits. Connect with mFilterIt today to safeguard your brand and unlock true growth this season.
