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How To Detect Mobile App Install Fraud?

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The total number of smartphone users in the world stands at 3.8 billion which is half the population of the world. With the pandemic hitting countries across the globe, the mobile industry witnessed a wave of change, from increased mobile usage to exponential growth in app installs. Brands and marketers saw it as an opportunity to get more customers, therefore mobile advertising spending has been projected to reach $368 billion in 2022. The share of app install ad spending is expected to grow by 30% by 2022 which is almost a third of today’s mobile ad spend. Due to increased mobile usage, there also has been an exponential rise in mobile app downloads. Studies suggest that mobile app downloads rose from 204 billion in 2019 to an expected 258 billion downloads in 2022. However, the one aspect which hasn’t been given due consideration/analyzed is how mobile app fraud has also grown in tandem with mobile installs, especially in the Covid times. As more and more users install and engage with mobile applications, fraudsters are leveraging this wide playing field to steal ad spends and drive fraudulent conversions. A study recently pointed out that 21.3% of iOS apps and 26.9% of Android mobile app installs are fraudulent. Other statistics suggest that an overall $25.8 billion has been lost to mobile ad fraud out of which 42% accounts for app installs farms/SDK spoofing, 30% for click injection the remaining 27% to click spam. Clearly, the problem is huge. What is Mobile App Install Fraud? A mobile app install fraud occurs when fraudsters generate fake downloads and installs using automated tools to trick advertisers and users. There are a plethora of ways fraudsters leverage to receive significant payouts from advertisers and marketers on the pretext of fake installs while marketers unknowingly pay millions of dollars in ad spend for installs that are not even genuine. One such technique of mobile app fraud is click injection. Fraudsters create malicious apps which are then published on major app stores which when downloaded generates a fake click. The clicks appear to be originating from the website of the malicious publisher. These apps then detect when new applications are downloaded on the device and then inject clicks after the download is completed and before the app is installed. In such ways, fraudsters receive money for every click and install by stealing genuine clicks and receiving payments on their behalf. Another technique used by fraudsters is ‘Device Emulators’. These devices are capable of mirroring every aspect of the original device’s behavior. Such devices are used to download and install applications in high volumes which create an illusion of new devices and legitimate users. Detecting Mobile app install fraud No industry is immune to fraud, hence it’s unavoidable. But to begin with, having the right attribution vendor is imperative. Apart from that, one can also pay attention to the following techniques to analyze mobile app install fraud: Non-human in-app behavior, commonly known as post-install anomalies Hyper Engagement- Multiple clicks from a single source Click to Install time outliners: Understanding the click which was meant to drive the install, either it was too early or too late. Events time outliners- Odd events such as installations at 3 am IP anomalies- Different IP addresses of the impression and then click Device blacklisting – Any install that takes place on a blacklisted device Fraud is a cyclical element. Fraudsters are continuously developing technologies to cheat the ecosystem whereas tech companies are constantly evolving to find ways to stop these fraudsters. Shockingly, 22% of fake installs happen in the eCommerce industry followed by the finance industry with close to 21% of mobile app install fraud. An average rate of fake installs generates up to $3 for the fraudsters. The sky is no longer the limit for the bad guys out there. Are you now questioning the data given to you for the installs that took place in your campaigns? Do you now question the marketing budgets set out for an install campaign? Worry not, we got you covered! Get in touch with our experts who will safeguard your budgets and maximize your ROAS by filtering out the mobile app fraud elements.

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Click Fraud Plaguing the BFSI Sector

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sources are generated by bots, automated click, or some type of click fraud? Ad Fraud is estimated to cost advertisers and brands an estimated of $44 billion to fraudulent activities by 2022. Studies also indicate that each year $1.5 billion is lost to affiliate marketing fraud. Imagine the plight when the ad spends which was allocated to acquire new users and expand reach is now being cannibalized by nefarious affiliates! mFilterIt analyzed affiliate installs in the banking sector towards the beginning of the 2nd quarter of this fiscal year. The result brought to light a very pertinent challenge that is plaguing the digital landscape. Click Spam, Fake Attribution are all instances of Click Fraud, and they contribute to 74% of fraud. IMPACT OF AFFILIATE FRAUD Drained ad budgets Skewed cost per conversions Brand reputation damage Abandonment by successful affiliates Signs of Click Fraud Unusual peak in number of clicks Clicks beyond targeted location Anomalies in performance data Spike in search cost How Can You Stop Click Fraud? Invest in the RIGHT Ad Fraud Detection Software Deep dive into the analytics Target only high-value sites Book a trial with us to safeguard your ad spends that maximize ROI and ensure safety for your ads and brands!

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Affiliate Fraud: A Menace in Banking Sector

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Time to protect your affiliate campaigns and catch hold fraudulent IP addresses The digital market has given birth to a plethora of affiliates who’re found across markets and industries of today. Proliferation of internet and rise of digital mediums have injected a new life in the affiliate marketing space by making it far effective than any other marketing strategy. These affiliates have a well-established visitor base which provides partnership opportunities for brands to enter new markets and explore customer base, thus giving your brand a stronger online presence. The most important aspect of engaging in affiliate campaign is that the outcome is completely performance based. The affiliates are paid a commission only when a desired action takes place thus these affiliates are motivated enough to drive the outcome (through any means) your brand is looking for. However, an increase in ad spend by companies have made affiliate marketing an attractive playground for fraudsters who’re eating away your budgets through affiliate fraud. mFilterIt detected that 38% of the affiliate campaigns in the banking sector are affected by affiliate ad campaign fraud. The How Where there’s money, there’s fraud. And with fraud, honest merchants and marketers are losing revenue and are left with drained ad budgets whereas dishonest affiliates are sending nothing but fake traffic your way, that’s affiliate fraud. After analyzing a million of data sets in the banking sector in affiliate campaign, it was observed that there has been an increase in website traffic and leads however the sales remained as is. Why? Dishonest affiliates had been sending traffic from bots, automated scripts and malware which means that the spike in website traffic was not because of a real user but bots messing up the numbers while your affiliates earns for every lead/click/install. Not just that, it was also seen that fraudulent traffic was generated by a common IP address. At mFilterIt, we have internalized certain criteria to evaluate the legitimacy of an IP address and determine if it’s safe or compromised. We undertake live IP blocklisting to weed out fraudsters to prevent affiliate fraud in your campaigns and red flag the anomalies to safeguard your spends.

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This Is All You Need to Know about Mobile App Fraud

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Mobile app fraud to remain a key security concern in 2021 We’ve come a long way from the onset of the Internet in the nation. From desktops to laptops, from telephones to smartphones, from LANs to mobile internet, from browsers to applications, we’re on the cusp of the digital revolution. Long gone are days of internet activities done on computers, thanks to the smartphone revolution, the majority of people now use a mobile device to browse the internet. To make consumer’s life easy, brands are now revolutionizing the digital game by converting and acquiring a new user base by providing them with a seamless experience on their hands via mobile applications. This switch in trend has also triggered a major challenge- smartphones have now become a breeding ground for scammers to defraud marketers, brands, and customers alike. With the onset of the pandemic, people have moved online and fraudulent transactions on smartphone apps have gone four-fold in recent years What is mobile app fraud? A fraudulent or a fake app are those applications that are created by fraudsters that mimic legitimate apps available on the Play store. The aim of these fraudsters is to mislead people about the actual app and trigger them to download these fake applications. Although most fraudulent applications are downloaded from third-party sources most of them also land on authentic Play Stores. These fake apps are responsible for injecting malware into your phones which can damage not only the operating system but can also compromise your privacy; passwords, photos, credit card information, identity, etc., in short stealing your data. As much it is important for users to protect themselves from these malicious threats, imagine the risk a brand has with respect to its reputation? A brand’s reputation is important to a brand’s success. Therefore, it is imperative for businesses of all kinds to monitor these fake apps and third-party sources for malicious apps and should be reported using the right tool. Such instances hamper your brand’s safety and reputation even if you have no relation to these applications. Mobile app fraud affecting your marketing funnel The Rise in digital advertising budgets owing to digitization requires marketers to remain vigilant of mobile app fraud issues which can hamper their efforts. Since fraudsters aim at claiming the advertising revenue, by generating fake installs these bad actors are defrauding all the stakeholders along the advertising chain. These fake installs misrepresent the data, therefore, affecting your marketing efforts. In most cases, skewed campaign results leave marketers wondering where they went wrong with their install campaign. Professional tools help you protect from such vulnerabilities and help better your marketing efforts thus ensuring better, bigger, and safer campaigns. Get in touch with us to ensure your campaign’s integrity.

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How Do Publishers Stand to Lose on Account of Ad Fraud?

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A study recently talked about how brands and marketers are losing money to ad fraud with estimates reaching as high as $100 billion by 2023. And it’s not just the advertisers who’re losing revenue due to such fraudulent activities. Publishers stand to lose a lot more when web fraud divert ad spends from high-quality websites to fraudulent ones. The loss of revenue coupled with losing trust in the publisher affects the entire ad campaign tactics for all the stakeholders in the ad ecosystem. Today, even quality sites face a threat to ad fraud given the rise in sophisticated forms of tools and technologies deployed by fraudsters to deplete ad budgets and divert traffic. A publisher offers readers and an audience for advertisers which in turn helps brands to get the user’s attention. More the attention and readers a publisher can garner, the more the advertisers are willing to pay for the inventory. It is commonly understood that ad fraud, in principle, only hurts an advertiser. What is not noted is that publishers’ business depends on the trust of these advertisers. These fraudsters take advantage of the digital ecosystem’s complexities to channel ad spends onto fake sites which should otherwise be going to legitimate publishers. A rise in programmatic buying has further exacerbated the problem of ad fraud. Real-time bidding on ads where an ad is shown as soon as the website is loaded gives fraudsters a quick gateway to enter the funnel to commit fraud. There are a plethora of sites to choose from for media buyers when they’re bidding on ads programmatically. Media buyers are spoilt with choices to choose from as long as they know that the site offers premium inventory in terms of human audiences. What they’re not aware of is that the fraudsters have infiltrated the ecosystem with an army of fake bots and fake websites and offering it up as a premium inventory. During the bid, these fake websites rank at the top with a large (fake) audience base and at a much cheaper price vis-à-vis a legitimate publisher who’s offering real audiences. These situations are forcing honest publishers to lower their inventory price in order to compete with fraudsters which in turn deflate the entire market. In short, advertisers are losing revenue on account of ad fraud (with the deflated value of ad inventory) and the pervasive issue of ad fraud is causing publishers to lose the only thing which makes them profit in the first place, margin compression. Desperate times, desperate measures! Due to loss in revenue and compressed margins, the publisher now opens its inventory to various exchanges. What happens here is that by listing on these exchanges they’re now prone to ‘domain spoofing’. Fake websites can now come up and pretend to be legitimate domains of these good publishers. Now when fraud detection tools detect high fraudulent activities on the domain which belongs to the fake publishers, the reputation of a legitimate publisher goes for a toss because the report states that the same domain had appeared in the placement report. This now gives the buyers a perspective that the reputed publisher deals in invalid traffic and fraudulent activities to pocket ad spends. But, is that the truth? In another instance, opening up for programmatic ads for ad slots on the page, publishers do not really know in advance the kind of ads which will be served in the slots. Taking advantage of the window here, criminals place ads with malicious code onto the reputed publishers’ site in order to compromise the user’s device. Although it’s not a publisher’s fault or a crime that the honest publisher committed, the user is tricked into believing that a legitimate publisher has caused them harm. While advertisers are fighting against fraud by using bot detection tools and other ad fraud prevention tools, publishers need to fight against fraud by proving to the advertisers that they have real and genuine human engagement. Ad Fraud detection & prevention is not restricted to removing bad traffic alone, it improves performance for the advertiser and in turn, the publisher gets to maintain their share of earnings. Publishers today need to work with fraud detection companies to showcase that their traffic comes from real human users. The entire ad ecosystem needs to be saved from the issue of such fraudulent activity where every stakeholder in the entire funnel is hanging by a thread of ad fraud!

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Is Fraud Affecting Your Retargeting Campaign?

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Fraudsters and digital criminals jump at any opportunity to pervade a marketing campaign. Their only aim is to drain the advertising budget and line up their own pockets. ( shh, it could either be your competitor who wants to eat away the budgets) Ways For Approaching The Audience Brands usually have two ways to approach their audience: a direct approach where the aim is to acquire a new customer interested in the product offering. The second approach is to rekindle the existing (or previous) relationship between the user and the product. The second approach is referred to as a retargeting strategy to get the user who has already visited your website, or previously engaged with the products and to offer them more product offerings, thus leading to a conversion. It is important to note that if a user has already shown an interest in the product offered by the brand, they are more likely to re-engage with the brand (requires less convincing), with the condition that the user had a positive experience previously. This is also one of the reasons that retargeting campaigns attract a higher cost than regular display campaigns. FMCG has the highest expenditure on digital advertising. The majority of the brands undertake retargeting as a marketing technique to interact with old customers and target new products towards them. It is estimated that 22% of digital spending is lost to ad fraud. One can only imagine the potential losses the brands may be facing. Let us deep dive further to understand the nuances of retargeting frauds. How fraudsters infiltrate your retargeting campaign? Remarketing traffic are the users who’ve proven to be legit and active users who’re no longer under the purview of ‘fraud traffic’. When advertisers retarget these users they lower their shield because these users have previously been approached and converted. This is the biggest loophole that is exploited by the fraudsters to deploy attribution hijacking techniques and take away the credit of legitimate partners. With CPA campaigns being higher than CPI campaigns, the existing users re-engage with the product offerings, view, ads and contribute to revenue generation for the advertiser. It then becomes a lucrative way for the fraudsters to enjoy the higher CPA rate (using attribution hijacking techniques). One can well imagine the potential impact when a fraudster enters the remarketing database and the negative amplification of the equation. Click flooding, install hijacking essentially eliminates the legitimate partner from getting the credit for acquired users. In other such instances, fraudsters deploy bot traffic which makes the shopping real; browsing through the website, adding items to the carts. The ad program doesn’t differentiate between the human and a fake bot thus identifying them as high-quality leads. This becomes a vicious cycle of bots pretending to be humans, ultimately depleting your ad budget. To conclude, marketing efforts and retargeting campaigns are not immune to fraudsters. Many loopholes can be exploited, new techniques are invented, but as a brand and as a marketer, one needs to be vigilant and deploy tools and solutions to keep these scammers at bay and reduce the probability of Ad fraud in their campaigns.

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Types of Mobile Advertising Fraud Across Industries

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India has witnessed an exponential rise in smartphone usage, internet penetration, which has furthered the growth of the Indian Digital Advertising ecosystem. Studies estimate that there were 624 million Internet users in India by January 2021 and the number of mobile connections was equivalent to 79% of the total population (1.39 billion is the current population). The growth in internet adoption, smartphone usage, and the ongoing Covid19 pandemic has impelled businesses to leverage digital marketing to reach their customers directly on their mobile devices. This growth, however, comes with its own set of challenges as the internet has become a playground for fraudsters MMA India Report states that 62% of all digital ad fraud occurs on mobile advertising, the most dominant type of digital advertising in India. Increased mobile adoption opens Pandora’s box of opportunities for digital criminals. Thus, one of the many reasons to develop an understanding of the different types of mobile ad fraud and how to detect them across industries. The ever-evolving ecosystem of mobile devices allows advertisers to deploy ads in varied formats. This provides the fraudsters with a number of ways in which they can trick their victims: from fake installs to attribution manipulation. Let us have a look at the different types of ad fraud in mobile advertising which are fairly common across industries. 1. Ad Stacking One of the most common types of mobile ad fraud, ad stacking is a scheme where multiple ads are served and displayed at once, one on top of the other, akin to a stack of folders in offices. This gives a window to immoral publishers to say that the said ad has been served (even though it was technically never visible). This form of ad fraud is also referred to as ad hiding thus can be a major cause of concern especially when a brand awareness campaign is being run. 2. Click Flooding In click flooding, fraudsters aim for tapping the last click/engagement prior to an actual install of the product being advertised. This is done by sending fraudulent clicks in large numbers with the intention of any click being credited for the download. Each click has a unique ID that is aimed to match any real user who downloaded the advertised application. 3.Bundle ID Spoofing Another very sophisticated type of ad fraud is Bundle ID spoofing. This is the methodology where fraudsters trick advertisers by making them believe that the ads are being run in the intended app, whereas in actuality it’s being run on another app. This is done by changing the parameters of the second application and giving the app a fake identifier, hence called bundle ID spoofing. The ads could appear on a black screen or in the background, making them invisible to the user. 4. Bots and Emulators Bots and emulators can be used on any platform to perform any type of ad fraud. For a mobile advertisement ad fraud, an emulator (software that can be run on any device to host devices to simulate tasks) can fake any device to look like a smartphone and then perform fake app installs, impressions without using the real device. Using this methodology, fraudsters fabricate the users and also fake attribution to claim the advertising credits. Similarly, bots can also be automated to perform and execute tasks at a high frequency (much faster than human users) and can generate fake clicks, installs, views, etc. 5. SDK Spoofing Another sophisticated method of mobile ad fraud, SDK spoofing creates legitimate-looking installs by using data of real devices without any real installs thus consuming all the advertising budget. The fraudsters also use this method by listening to the communication between the mobile measurement platform, app stores, ad networks, and attribution tools. These communications are then replicated (and edited) to simulate activities as per the set ad parameters such as installs, views, clicks, etc. Frauds and scams have been haunting the digital ecosystem since time immemorial. With advancements in technology, more sophisticated ways of mobile ad fraud can be witnessed. Understanding the types of mobile ad fraud can help prevent and fight against the rise in such instances.

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Top 3 Cost Benefits of Using Ad Fraud Solution in BFSI Sector

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Make most out of your ad spend Among a plethora of challenges faced by a brand and a marketer, ad fraud makes it to the top of the battle list. This battle is real- the bots eating up the digital ad impressions and burning a hole in the effectiveness of ad spending. What’s the outcome? The advertising has no effect on your business and money spent on ads goes down the drain (well, to the bots). Studies indicate that 25% (maybe more) of ad clicks are fraudulent clicks which means that brands and marketers pay the fraudsters one out of every four times when an ad has been clicked. Not really the most effective way to spend money on advertising, right? So where and how does an ad fraud solution help your business? In the BFSI sector, the number of transactions and requests that have to be looked at and analyzed are in millions. It’s no surprise that the marketing departments of the brands in the BFSI sector are becoming a hide-out for fraudsters cashing out the ad budgets. With high incentives and minimal chances of being caught, these fraudsters are feasting off the spending while the businesses deal with the loss. Here we list the top 3 cost benefits of using an Ad Fraud Solution to make the most out of your ad spend. 1. Ad Spend Optimization Although it’s been a subject of debate regarding the total cost of ad fraud‘s impact on business. (Debate whether if it’s higher than the stated value, imagine the plight!) According to studies, the bucks are set at a whopping loss of $87 billion by 2022. Now imagine betting against the odds of losing 25% of the ad revenue to fraudsters and scammers. An ad fraud detection solution helps in reclaiming a business’s lost spending thus giving a better and more accurate clarity on obtaining lucrative results on the campaign by pinpointing lagging indicators, diagnostic metrics, and identifying leading indicators of a campaign, among others. The tools cut through external noises and help a marketer to have a focused viewpoint rather than giving a myopic view. 2. Improving Your Metrics The digital age is running on data as its fuel. From big to small businesses, big data and analytics are leveraged to provide a solution and improve performances. An ad fraud solution helps in reducing fraud by providing the marketer with clean data to determine and help formulate strategies and solutions for online ad campaigns. These clean and clear data sets will provide a pathway to optimize the campaigns and give insights into what’s working and what’s not. Thus, aiding in intelligent-data-driven decisions (and possibly convincing C-suite leaders to double up on ad spends). 3. Increased Budgets, Growth, and Revenue Acceleration Optimizing the ad spend by protecting against fraudulent activities (bad clicks, fake installs, fake impressions, etc), ad fraud detection solutions help campaigns generate favorable results by rightfully spending the budget. This means that the 25% of the money which was flowing into accounts of unscrupulous actors are now prevented and utilized to fulfill the objective of the ad campaign. And with the right data churned by such tools, a bigger budget can then be defined to undertake big campaigns. Adding it all, ad fraud solutions thus drive ROI in campaigns, increase demand, awareness which ultimately helps in accelerating the company’s growth. With such tools, expansion is all that matters: in metrics, conversion, revenue, and growth. Moreover, the money doesn’t go to the fraudsters, a win-win scenario! Ad fraud is a problem that is only expected to grow and get worse over time. It has now become more important than ever to invest in the right ad fraud solution tools to safeguard your marketing spending. Request a trial with mFilterIt to see how ad fraud is affecting your business and how can you tackle it and spend your ad budget effectively.

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Is Ad Fraud Impacting CMO’s Performance?

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Is Ad-fraud responsible for shrinking CMO tenure? With digital spends cross over 50% of the total media spends, inefficiencies like ad-fraud will hit their potential as well as the performance. Recently, executive search firm Spencer Stuart revealed an interesting insight about the shrinking tenure of CMOs reaching to 40 months, lowest since 2009. In sharp contrast the tenure of a CEO reached an all time high of 80 months. So, one wonders what’s going wrong with CMOs when the ‘captain of captains’ – CEO is stable. The answer perhaps lies in the fact that Ad-fraud is not only impacting the marketing spends but also adversely affecting the performance of the CMOs as well. We have already entered into the third era of digital marketing where it is now more than 50% of the total market spends across various mediums. As the digital spending as a percentage of total media spends keeps on increasing, any inefficiency or weakness in the value chain will not only restrict but retard the growth. Overall, ad-fraud and adjacent inefficiencies waste 6-9% of the total digital spends, while on performance marketing it results in almost 30% spends without any returns. Tracing the journey of our clients, we have noticed how the digital marketing mix is switching in favor of performance marketing than brand marketing. Some 3 years back, performance marketing would constitute just 20-25% of the total digital marketing spending, which is now in many cases over 55%. So even if for argument’s sake, we say that ad fraud only happens in performance marketing, its impact on the overall digital spending is only increasing. This is nothing less than a nightmare for any marketer including the captain – the CMO. In digital, the results should be delivered in real-time. At the same time, many CEOs are still catching up with the nuances of digital. This sets off wrong expectations when they see results not coming up quickly as is inherently attached with the digital. As a result, CMO has to take responsibility. For the CMO, it will take some time for the entire CXO suite to understand that even in digital things don’t happen overnight and in real-time. However, what definitely can be plugged in is the inefficiencies that ad fraud results in. Otherwise, the CMO is going to be questioned every time inside the boardroom as well as otherwise about the return on ad spends over digital. By taking cognize of ad fraud a CMO can instantly reduce wastes on performance marketing in the range of 25-30% translating in improvement in overall return on digital marketing by another 6-8 percent points. CMO has become a change agent as well as a business officer with digital getting more prominence. A CMO today not only drives return on marketing but also brings in leads, sales, and eventually revenue. So if there is no clean and safe medium to market digitally, the results will always be interpreted as underperformance of the function as well as the individual. This is what will continue to create turbulence in the marketing functions of any organization and we will see CMOs departing the CXO suite more often than any other CXO.

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Burning the Ad Fraud Fat from Digital Advertising

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mFilterIt’s Quick Guide for Marketers Ad fraud is just like bad fat in the body. It unnecessarily makes things look ‘healthy’. At the same time, it results in other lifestyle diseases just like obesity. To manage it and make sporty campaigns, here is a quick guide from mFilterIt based on excerpts of best practices implemented by it across some of the leading digital advertisers globally. Extremely good or bad performance are both indicators of ad fraud. Analyze the performance mix of the campaigns and get a deeper audit done if the results are too good to believe or too bad to absorb. There is no single medium that is fraud-free. Do not switch from one medium of advertising to another to combat fraud. Achieve higher integrity of ads within the existing mediums of engagement otherwise, there will always be a fresh learning curve to uphill. Ad fraud is not just about losing money. Similar to obesity, it results in other ailments like Brand Safety issues. Do monitor the placement of the ads and the relevancy of channels being engaged. The quality of the campaign is also to be monitored. Changing the model of engagement will again not result in tackling ad fraud. Irrespective of the model on which campaigns are running – CPC, CPCV, CPL, CPS, etc., fraudsters can trick ad fraud. In fact, the tougher the metrics to qualify, the higher the motivation to fraud. Engage with partners who understand ad fraud. Do not go by the disclaimer that there is no ad fraud through a particular partner. Evaluate if the partners are being checked and have ad-fraud specialists who are certified for it. Encourage your teams to understand ad fraud. Organize cross-team workshops for awareness of ad fraud as this impacts digital marketing function as well as other functions. It does have an impact on revenue, sales, procurement, and others as well. Check every element of an ad. Reassure yourself about the compliances and brand guidelines being followed by partners while designing ad-creatives, content, etc. Brand infringement is not only about wrong information about your business and products. It is also about selling fake/counterfeit products and services which could result in legal hassles for your brand. Watch out for any brand infringement in the digital space in real-time. Organic stealing not only makes you pay unnecessarily someone else hijacks the attribution. It also demotivates the internal digital team as their good work goes unnoticed. Track who is bidding on your brand keywords and diverting traffic through them. The above action points will help marketers to effectively manage and curtail ad fraud, brand safety challenges, and the growing brand infringement problems. However, strategically the best practice is to address ad fraud with an open mind rather than going with the hypothesis that no ad fraud to possible. This can then be audited and validated by a mix of home exercises and a professionally run ‘gym’ to burn the fat and have a sporty, strong, and good-looking campaign, which will fetch great results.

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