Blog

Brand Bidding

Protection from Brand Bidding with AI and Automations for Brands and Ad Networks

Competitors or affiliates may bid on your brand keywords, potentially driving up costs and diluting your brand’s presence. A comprehensive affiliate monitoring tool needs to be in place to safeguard your affiliate marketing spend and protect your brand reputation.  Identify affiliate and competition bidding on your brand keywords along with whitespaces across locations for own and competition keywords.    Brand bidding fraud costs approx. $1.3 billion each year as competitors bid on branded keywords. Over 60% of brand terms are targeted by competitors, inflating cost-per-click (CPC) by up to 30% and reducing conversion rates by 5-10%. This not only drives up advertising costs but also dilutes brand recognition, as 50% of users may click on a competitor’s ad when searching for a brand name. This leads to confusion and lost customers.   Businesses must actively monitor and optimize their paid search campaigns while implementing robust brand safety solutions to mitigate these risks.  What is Brand Bidding? Brand bidding refers to a practice that falls under paid search marketing. It’s a digital marketing strategy where brands bid on their own brand keywords in search engine advertising platforms like Google Ads and when someone searches for your brand name, your company’s sponsored listing is more likely to appear at the top of the search results page.   But this turns into a brand reputation threat and leads when aggressive affiliate bids, potentially aiming to capture traffic and drive sales through affiliate programs or competition bids on your brand keywords.    Why is affiliate monitoring needed for Advertisers? Affiliate monitoring ensures the integrity of campaigns, protects brand reputation, and optimizes performance.   Concerns in Brand Bidding:   – Campaign Integrity: Monitoring affiliate activities ensures that campaigns are running as intended. It helps to identify if affiliates are engaging in practices like brand bidding, misleading advertising, or promoting the brand inappropriately.  – Protecting Brand Reputation: When affiliates are bidding on brand-specific keywords (e.g., your company’s name or a competitor’s), it can confuse customers or misdirect them to other sites. Without monitoring, there’s a risk that your brand reputation could be damaged if affiliates don’t align with your brand values or make misleading claims.  – Optimizing Performance: By closely tracking affiliate performance, advertisers can identify high-performing affiliates and cut out low-performing ones. This ensures that advertising spend is allocated effectively, improving overall return on investment (ROI).  – Organic poaching: A major concern that brands should be careful about. It occurs when affiliates or competitors bid on a brand’s keywords, capturing traffic that would have naturally come to the brand’s website. This misappropriates organic leads and increases costs as the brand must pay commissions to affiliates for traffic that would have come organically.  Ensures unauthorized affiliates are not bidding on brand keywords or misdirecting customers. Prevent unnecessary commissions and preserve your organic search efforts.  Prevent affiliates from hijacking brand visibility, ensuring the brand stays front and center for potential customers without competitors benefiting from organic traffic.  Stopping organic poaching ensures that their customers are consistently directed to the brand, which enhances trust and customer loyalty.  Case Study 1: Brand Bidding for a Popular Shoe Brand Problem statement: Brand was facing challenges in ensuring effectiveness of keyword the brand bidding on across multiple geographies and wants to identify competitor bidding on their brand keyword.   mFilterIt Solution: mFilterIt analysis and insights into the effectiveness of brand bidding, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of a well-known shoe brand across major Indian cities.   We meticulously monitored 35 keywords related to the brand, including brand keyword variations across 35 cities. This allowed us to understand the search queries users were employing to find the brand.   The brand garnered a significant search volume across time slots. This indicated strong interest in and demand for the brand.   A substantial 50% of the total searches were Google Ads for the brand’s keywords. This demonstrated the competitive landscape and the efforts of various entities to capture search traffic.   We identified 28% were competitors count which were actively bidding on the brand’s keywords. This highlighted the intense competition for visibility and market share.    22% of the total came from affiliates and coupon websites who were also bidding on the bidding keywords. This revealed that affiliates were also using brand keywords and running ads.   mFilterIt Impact Here are some key observation and Findings:   – Organic Poaching by aggressive Affiliate Bidding: Affiliates & coupon websites were particularly active in bidding on brand keywords, potentially aiming to capture traffic and drive sales. They were capturing organic users. This is called organic poaching. The brand was having to pay commissions to affiliates where the customer would have come organically.   – Competition on Brand Keywords: Competitors were actively bidding on the brand’s keywords, which meant that competition keyword strategies needed to be built within the marketing approach.  AI based Optimization in Brand Bidding with mFilterIt LOCOKS LOCOKS (Location & Campaign Optimization Keyword Strategy) with AI-ML powered automation of brand bidding process can make identifying and bidding on brand keyword more efficient and controlled. It also prevents overspending on keyword bidding and can schedule when to start or stop the bidding and limit the budget spent for a particular time slot.   – Geo Based Tracking: Our tracker runs in different cities and analyses the different sources of traffic related to a set of keywords coming from various sources  – Intelligent Reporting: Identify when competitors invest more or less and on which keyword. Discover key periods when keyword competition increases or decreases and take action on the findings   – Time Based Tracking: Tracks on-the-basis of day – parting, hourly tracking, ad scheduling strategies of competitors and affiliates   – Seasonal Sales/ Discounts: As most frauds occur during the flash sales such as Black Friday, Prime day etc., we track the user journey to check the source.   Case Study 2: mFilterIt LOCOKS Solution for Optimizing Competition Keywords and Brand Visibility Problem Statement: An advertiser was struggling with white spaces in their campaign where both competition keywords and brand keywords were not targeted. They wanted to identify such whitespaces and explore

Protection from Brand Bidding with AI and Automations for Brands and Ad Networks Read More »

Ad Fraud Verification

Is Your Ad Fraud Verification Partner Using the Latest Technology?

Ad fraud is not any more a storm that comes and goes, it has become the reality in the digital ecosystem. The techniques have become sophisticated, and it is going to become difficult for advertisers to differentiate between a bot and a human. To protect the ad spends, the marketers need to adopt an advanced technique to combat the impact of ad fraud. For validating the ad traffic and helping advertisers get transparency of their traffic quality, there are ad verification solution providers. These verification partners play a crucial role in combatting ad fraud. They help advertisers understand whether their ads are seen by bots or humans. Advertisers, this question is for you: Is your ad fraud verification partner doing enough to protect your ads from ad fraud? More specifically, is your ad verification partner keeping up with the latest technology to protect your ad spends and ensure transparency in your campaigns? Let us help you decode this. Why Advertiser’s Need to Question Their Verification Partner? Imagine this, you’re investing money in your digital campaigns, with the trust that their ad verification partners are ensuring that their ads reach real humans and not bots. However, you realize that even after validating the digital ads, your ads are exposed to ad fraud.  You keep seeing weird patterns, high CTRs, low visit/click rations, fake leads, junk websites etc and you keep trying to work with your agency to optimize. But shouldn’t your Ad Verification partner take the burden of keeping your campaign from fraud? The question the advertisers need to ask their verification partner is not “what they are doing” but “how they are doing it”. Are they still using traditional methods to validate your ad traffic that leaves your campaigns vulnerable? Limitations of Traditional Ad Fraud Detection Technology Many traditional ad traffic validation vendors use the 1×1 image tags, which are essentially small, invisible traffic hits embedded in ads to track impressions. While these tags are easy to integrate and cost-effective (for the verification partner), they are inefficient in identifying fraud. It can only track impression hits and fails to validate sophisticated fraud patterns and doesn’t provide substantial insights to advertisers. It can easily be spoofed, the number of parameters it picks are only marginal, which does not allow any sophisticated fraud detection to be done. Parameters which 1×1 can pick: IP Address: This is now getting anonymized (courtesy apple, relay etc) which means it is a low confidence signal. User Agent: Most browsers now reduce the data sent in the user-agent and only put an indication of the device, stripping it from everything. Referral URL: Where did the user come from. It can also be spoofed and again is a low confidence signal. That’s it. Infact 1×1 is so weak that you can trigger it from your laptop repeatedly and all of those will get tracked. Its value is limited to counting impressions (and limited to that as well) rather than detecting fraud. It was more suitable for ad-servers like Sizmek etc. and not IVT vendors like DV/IAS etc. Even worse, some partners claim they’re using advanced technology while still deploying 1×1 tags in the background. Here’s why 1×1 tags are not enough to combat ad fraud: They only count impressions: These tags cannot give deep insights into whether the impressions were generated by bots or humans. No fraud detection: They lack the ability to identify patterns that signal fraudulent activity. Limited campaign insights: Critical metrics such as viewability, engagement, and location cannot be tracked. Easily spoofed: The metrics can be easily spoofed as there is no transparency of where the traffic came from. Why, then, do some traditional ad verification partners still use them? Because they’re simple to implement and allow verification providers to check the box without delivering real value to advertisers. Convenience over value Imagine you as an advertiser ask an IVT vendor to support publisher A. Publisher A is excited for the campaign you are providing and works with IVT vendor to be onboarded. Publisher A and the IVT vendor BOTH want to get this started asap, since there is money from the campaign to be made. They will take the easy route of integrating a 1×1 which is basically the simplest to plug in. Both will proudly declare to you how they are now “certified” partners and advertisers can now go ahead with 100% confidence that their campaigns are safe. Compounded with the fact that processing a 1×1 is generally 10x cheaper than a tag like VPAID or VAST. And the IVT vendor makes the same money from you across either tag (generally they charge on %age of media which is agnostic to the tag being used) But what if I told you that there are much better tech tags available. But your IVT vendor has lazily chosen the cheapest and fastest to plug in tag rather than consider your best interest in their mind? Advertisers, It’s Time to Clear the Smoke The technology used by these traditional ad fraud detection vendors is not enough to combat evolving ad fraud techniques. Their schemes are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. To detect these sophisticated frauds, advertisers need a solution that can go beyond the basic checks. Countering the 1×1 tags, there are JavaScript Tags and VAST tags, which help give a holistic coverage, providing deeper insights into traffic quality, user behavior, and potential red flags. Here’s what sets them apart: Comprehensive fraud detection: They can evaluate up to 70-80 parameters, including location, device type, session patterns, and viewability metrics. JS tags are a piece of code which runs on the client website / video player picking up many data points to detect how the ad is being served, visible, obstructions to it, content on the page, browser parameters, mouse parameters, screen size etc. which is very powerful in detecting the fraud. Real-time insights: These technologies can detect and act on fraud indicators in real-time, reducing wasted ad spend. Better campaign performance: By identifying

Is Your Ad Fraud Verification Partner Using the Latest Technology? Read More »

Programmatic Advertising

Ai in Programmatic Advertising Fraud Detection to Deliver Performance and Sustainability

The rise of programmatic advertising has shifted the focus towards accuracy and automation. It surged from $9.75 billion in 2023 to $12.46 billion in 2024, an annual growth rate of 27.8% and is expected to continue expanding, reaching $28.12 billion by 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.6%. However, with AI coming into the picture, performance programmatic platforms are prone to ad fraud even more. The need for optimization of programmatic media buying with comprehensive ad fraud solution  across the advertising funnel is the necessity to yield results.   More and more advertisers are pushing for a stronger and harder success KPIs in programmatic advertising. The shift from visibility only to performance-first is underway. With new and upcoming programmatic platforms selling inventory on impressions, it is today evident that impression fraud is 10-15% of campaign spends in the MENA region, as per mFilterIt reports. There is a ROI uplift of 7-10% when advertisers identify and block for Made-For-Ad sites and Ad Frequency cap violations.  For advertisers, an ad traffic validation tool is the need of the hour to weed out fraud, optimise programmatic traffic and improve the hard KPIs of their campaigns. Also, programmatic platforms & ad networks have started providing ‘Certificate of Verification’ to advertisers to ensure their ad inventories are validated.    Let’s dig deeper into the explore how programmatic ad fraud detection can help elevate performance of ad campaigns and what are the key challenges.   Why Programmatic Ad fraud prevention? Protect your brand with programmatic ad fraud prevention. Ensuring the invalid traffic is blocked from malicious sources not only safeguards advertising budget but also protect brand reputation.   Safeguard Your Programmatic Ad Campaigns from Fraud-Explore Our Expert Solutions. Here’s how mFilterIt guides with trust and transparency in programmatic advertising:  Impression fraud Impression Fraud analysis is better at the post-bid stage than pre-bid, measuring performance beyond viewability metrics. In pre-bid analysis, i.e. before the ad is served, fraud can be identified based on only two parameters, IP and User Agents. Also, the time for analysis is limited to 10 milliseconds. This results in a meager 2% fraud identification.      This is where a post-bid analysis trumps a pre-bid impression validation. Now that we have several more parameters fraud detection is done on deterministic and heuristic measures as well. This results in the detection of higher invalid impressions of 15-20%.  This results in improved ROI on Ad spending. Post-bid impression analysis is a more beneficial method for detecting ad fraud.  Made for Ad sites Advertisers spend an average of 15% of their programmatic budget on MFA sites, but some may spend as much as 42%. While 35% of programmatic spending is wasted on low-value environments like MFA sites, according to a recent study by ANA (Association of National Advertisers).  By focusing on robust ad fraud detection advertisers can combat the various forms of fraud that undermine their campaigns across digital advertising platforms. Prioritizing impression validation is essential for maximizing return on investment and maintaining trust in the advertising ecosystem.    MFA Sites not only drain budgets but also pose a challenge to a brand’s safety. Limited reach and exposure, no real user engagement misleading clicks,  click fraud, artificially inflated metrics, poor conversion rates, low-quality/intent traffic and brand un-safe content tarnished brand image and lead to budget drainage.   mFilterIt identify ad placement on MFA sites with   Deep Content Analytics: A multi-faceted analysis using NLP & image & video analysis to identify brand unsafe content. Advanced AI-ML Sophisticated Algos: AI –ML driven analytics for extraction of meaningful insights, patterns, and information.  Regional & Contextual Understanding: Local language, cultural nuances and domestic norms lead to overall risk assessments. Extensive MFA Repository A collection of websites & metric measurement is gathered with regular updates & feedback loop  Fig. 1: The site has multiple ad-stacked ads with high refresh rates. It’s also brand-unsafe promoting gambling.   Ad Frequency Cap Violations The most common and often neglected issue is Frequency Capping  (F-Cap) violations along with bots spamming impressions for burning media budget. Brands need to be vigilant and identify F-cap violations to make sure their ad reaches the broader and relevant audience and is not seen by similar sets multiple times to generate impressions leading to ad fatigue, not conversions.  A quick succession of impressions generated from the same google advertising ID. Distribution for a genuine user could be distributed throughout the day.  These impressions were not only coming so excessively but were also being shown quickly. Multiple Impressions in a Short Period.  A single GAID generates multiple impressions quickly.  Impression Injection from subnets which reflect that the usage of device farm to fire multiple impressions. Subnets divide a larger network into smaller, more manageable sections. IP Repetition with Same IP, different users. It reflects high chances of fake impressions being injected with different GAIDs.  Same IP, Different Impressions. This issue is not limited to IP repetition, but it extends further with the same IP generating multiple unique GAIDs and different impressions.    Viewability & Attention metrics Instead of focusing on a single data signal, check on attention metrics along with viewability encompassing a range of data points. These are processed by a machine-learning model to estimate the probability that a specific media environment and ad creative will capture the attention of a hypothetical audience member.  However, Viewability only itself does not help in taking decisions when it comes to effectiveness or attention. Multiple factors need to be measured, monitored and acted upon swiftly. The Viewability and Attention Model encompasses several key factors that determine the effectiveness of an ad in capturing audience attention. Viewability refers to the percentage of an ad that is actually visible to users and the duration it remains in view.   It must also include:  Viewability Metrices % of ad viewability and number of second viewed based on IAB standards   Display ads should be at least 50% of the ad’s pixels are visible in the browser window for at least one second   Video ads must be at least 50% of the ad unit

Ai in Programmatic Advertising Fraud Detection to Deliver Performance and Sustainability Read More »

Mobile Ad Fraud

Mobile Ad Fraud: Challenges for Advertisers in the USA

As mobile app ads have become more pervasive, advertisers are facing growing concerns around app installation fraud and the complexity of detecting fraudulent activity, especially in markets like the USA, where the stakes are high. The U.S. market mobile ad fraud, with estimated losses of around $1.2 billion. The focus is on safeguarding the organic traffic stolen, preventing APK fraud and referral fraud along with full-stack fraud prevention that can help optimize ad campaigns and build trust and transparency across the digital advertising ecosystem.  Let’s dive deeper the unveil the various aspects of mobile ad fraud and how to combat them.  Challenges of Mobile Ad Fraud in the USA The mobile app ecosystem is growing and evolving and expanding across the global especially in the BFSI industries, the rise of Fintech apps and lending apps has also raised the stake of fraud prevention in app ecosystem.  Most app fraud prevention apps don’t cover the sophisticated and dynamic nature of ad frauds that lead to fake installs and thereby low return on investment.   Here are some of the major challenges:   Organic hijacking via Click Spam: Theft of organic traffic is one of the biggest hurdles in mobile app advertising. Deceptive techniques to mimic legitimate installs and generate traffic that appears organic, resulting in inflated numbers that distort performance metrics. It leads to skewed insights for advertisers who rely on authentic user data and affects the return on investment (ROI).    Click Fraud: Validating traffic with comprehensive click fraud prevention is a must for advertisers to excel in the competitive landscape and ensure that budget is spent on valid clicks only. The deterministic, heuristic and behavioral checks with google approved mFilterIt click tracker can help combat fraud like no other.   APK installs: Fraudulent mobile app ads are created to mislead users into downloading fake apps or counterfeit APK files. This compromises devices or artificially boosts install metrics. Detecting APK fraud is essential for ensuring that advertising budget is spent effectively and that users are protected from malicious content and bring true performance to their campaigns.  Referral fraud: Fake referrals or incentivized clicks driving traffic inflate numbers that affect campaign efficiency. Fraudulent end users use the coupons codes multiple times either by cloning the app or by using VPN/Proxies etc. creating multiple device environments in the same device.  By exploiting referral programs, fraudsters generate fake installs and impressions, tricking advertisers into paying for traffic that doesn’t convert. Implementing mobile ad fraud detection systems can protect advertisers who rely on mobile app ads to drive real user engagement.  How can advertisers combat mobile ad fraud? Make Payout for validated traffic and work with Trusted Publishers Validate traffic and pay for only genuine engagement. Identify the publishers the bring in influx of invalid or fraudulent traffic to your campaign and work with only trusted published to protect integrity of your ad campaign.   Encourage Good practice by Ad Networks to give a ‘Certificate of Validity’ Ad traffic validation could also support ad networks to authenticate and validate based on the performance to safeguard the interest of advertiser and builds clean and transparent digital advertising ecosystem.   Ask MMPs the right questions Do not trust the MMPs blindly, a third-party validation removes the suspicion around traffic validation as fraudsters bypass MMP fraud detection. Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) have become pivotal for marketers and businesses, especially in tracking app installs, user engagement, and campaign performance. However, recent developments highlight the limitations of solely depending on MMPs for ad fraud detection.  How deploying independent Third-Party validators build transparency? The most effective way for advertisers to combat mobile ad fraud is by using independent third-party validators—an unbiased, external layer of protection. Validate the fake traffic and interactions associated with an ad campaign. mFilterIt offers a comprehensive ad fraud detection system powered by advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. It can identify suspicious patterns with deterministic, heuristic, and behavioral checks.   It enables advertisers to identify and block fraudulent activities before they drain their budgets and ensure that only genuine traffic is counted, reducing the risk of fraudulent interactions, like click fraud, bots, and fake impressions. As an essential step in the fight against ad fraud and invalid traffic, it is important to validate before advertisers, ad networks and agencies collaborate with publishers.  Monitor and verify each install or click with Mobile ad fraud detection solutions. It helps in identifying APK fraud, referral fraud, and protects organic traffic from being stolen. Proactive fraud prevention using data-driven strategies preserves the integrity of mobile advertising campaigns and ensures it delivers true value.  Impression Integrity: Start with checking up impression integrity with Impressions validation, ad visibility and post-bid validation.   Click Integrity: Weed out invalid or fraudulent traffic and bots with click fraud prevention.   Install Validation: Check if the installs are by genuine customers or bots also follows up tracking soft KPIs and events triggered such as registration, logins or signups.   Re-engagement & Post-back Blocking: Hard KPIs such purchases, deposits, and transactions also need to be validated for efficient re-engagement and post-back blocking.  Advertisers and developers need to adopt robust ad fraud detection systems with advanced algorithms and machine learning tools to identify suspicious patterns and block fraudulent activities. As an essential step in the fight against fraud, validate before collaborating. Trusted ad networks and ensured transparency in mobile ad transactions.  Here are some benefits of proactive mobile app fraud prevention:  Weed out fraud to improve ad campaign efficiencies  Enabling brands to take better-quality business decisions  Show funnel visibility & transparency basis performance  Optimizing the publisher ecosystem  Case Study: How FinTech App identified high volume of Fake Installs Problem Statement Fake app installs were significantly inflating the user acquisition costs and reducing the efficiency of marketing campaigns. They needed to identify sources of such fake installs and block them. High volume of fake install adversely affects the overall return on investment (ROI).   The Challenges Inability to accurately measure genuine user engagement and conversion rates. Due to a lack

Mobile Ad Fraud: Challenges for Advertisers in the USA Read More »

Stock Availability

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

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

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

Bot Traffic

Google Ads Isn’t Fraud-Proof—Here’s What You Need to Know

For digital marketers, walled garden is not a foreign word. However, we will take a quick minute to throw light on it.   Walled gardens is a term coined in digital marketing for closed advertising environment where all the operations are controlled by the ecosystem provider. Some of the major players ruling this landscape are Google, Meta, and Amazon. They offer the advertisers access to a large set of audiences and comprehensive data analytics.  Due to the nature of walled gardens, these platforms are often perceived to be a protected space for advertisers. This means that the traffic is assumed to be high quality.   However, reality is not exactly black and white. It is grey.   Let’s find out.   The Myth is – Walled Gardens don’t have bot traffic   When advertising on walled gardens, the advertisers often perceive that their ads are receiving filtered traffic, due to the close nature of the walled garden ecosystem.   The walled gardens claim robust proprietary technologies and algorithms that filter out suspicious or bot-driven activity, leading advertisers to believe these environments are more secure.   However, this “black box” approach also means that advertisers must trust the platform’s own reporting and assurances. Independent verification is limited, so advertisers often accept the platforms’ claims at face value. The perception of reduced bot traffic is partly an outcome of this reliance on self-reported data, alongside platforms’ reputations and massive resources dedicated to tech infrastructure and security. These walled gardens can detect and safeguard from general invalid traffic, however the bots have also become sophisticated over the years. Its ability to mimic human behavior makes it easy to bypass basic rule-based checks. Due to opaque reporting, the advertisers are unaware of the quality of their ad traffic and who is watching their ads. Sophisticated Bots penetrate walled gardens  Sophisticated bots are designed by fraudsters to mimic human behavior in ways that they can mask their movements to evade detection. These bots are capable of taking actions like clicking, scrolling, and even fill forms, which makes it difficult to identify then and differentiate from real users.   These sophisticated bots can even adapt with platform-specific platforms, adjusting their patterns to avoid suspicion. As walled gardens restrict access to third-party ad fraud detection solution, resulting in limited visibility and transparency for advertisers, these bots use this opportunity. Signs of a Sophisticated bot activity   Repetitive visits from a single device  In this case, visits came repeatedly from a single device in a short span of time, indicating abnormal traffic.    Multiple visits in short time span from a single device  In this case, the visits are coming in a short time from the same device fingerprinting, indicating a bot traffic.  Impersonation of a specific device   In this case, the fraudsters impersonate the identity of a specific device. This technique is used by fraudulent affiliates to exhaust the ad budget. Due to this no event (lead/purchases) come from this device. In this case, the visits are coming from a single device, where the user agent at client and server are different, indicating abnormal behaviour.     Partner with an ad fraud validation tool for walled Garden  No platform is immune to bot traffic, including walled gardens. To get full transparency of their ad traffic, advertisers need an advanced solution that can identify sophisticated bots patterns effectively and block them proactively.   The benefit of blocking bot traffic is not limited to clean traffic, but it also helps to improve conversion rate of the ad campaigns. To ensure that the sophisticated bot traffic doesn’t bypass the detection methods, we at mFilterIt use a full-funnel approach along with identifying device signals, behavioral and heuristic checks.   Unlike traditional ad fraud solution vendors, mFilterIt goes beyond the impressions and clicks level to identify sophisticated bot traffic. Our solution detects suspicious traffic at the visit level where more sophisticated patterns can be detected and blocked.   Therefore, protection at just the impression and click level is not enough. Advertisers have to look beyond that to ensure their campaigns on walled gardens are protected from bot traffic.   How did an automobile player improved their conversion rate using Valid8 by mFilterIt?   The major automobile player was running Google search campaigns to bring traffic to their website from various meta platforms. But despite substantial spending, the conversion rate was suspiciously low. Upon identifying suspicious ad traffic patterns, we started the blacklisting process. This resulted in cleaner clicks and lead, improved conversion rate and a savings of $0.47 million for the brand.   Refer to the images below to see the results:   A 13% drop in click fraud and 11% drop in lead fraud rates  A 1.75x increase in conversion ratio  Start Blocking Bot Traffic on Walled Gardens   While walled gardens are trusted for their controlled and secure environment, the reality is that they are not bot-free. To protect ad campaigns from the sophisticated patterns of bot, the advertisers need an additional layer of protection by partnering with ad fraud detection vendor with advanced technology to ensure their ad budgets are consumed to attract genuine audience instead of bots. As bots continue to evolve, advertisers need transparency to evaluate where their ads are shown and who is watching their ads to better assess the quality of their ad traffic and maintain campaign integrity. Get in touch with us today to see how Valid8 by mFilterIt can help you uncover and eliminate hidden fraud in your walled garden campaigns.

Google Ads Isn’t Fraud-Proof—Here’s What You Need to Know Read More »

Quick Commerce

Rise of Quick Commerce in UAE: Are You Monitoring Where You Stand vs the Competition?

The Quick Commerce revolution is reshaping the e-commerce business landscape in the UAE at an unprecedented speed.  Convenience and customer-centric services are at the forefront pushing businesses to embrace a rapid online shopping model. As per recent projections by Statista, the Q-Commerce (quick commerce) market in the UAE is expected to reach a revenue of $3.27 million in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.71% from 2024 to 2029. This growth could drive the market volume up to $4.74 million by 2029 with 1.2 million users.  In this competitive landscape local players are building hyper-efficient delivery networks to compete alongside international giants. For brands, staying ahead requires market and competitive intelligence across platforms and geographies. Leveraging advanced tech-stack for Quick Commerce analytics to gauge where they stand compared to rivals, identify gaps, and explore new opportunities is the need of the hour. Today, it is not only helping brands to stay ahead of competition but also growing business and making it more profitable.   Quick Commerce in UAE  The Quick Commerce market in the United Arab Emirates is experiencing a surge in demand due to the country’s high population density and fast-paced lifestyle. Understanding the dynamics with quick commerce analytics and preparing brands for a transformative journey into the future.   Q-Commerce companies like Noon, Talabat, Carrefour etc. typically operate their own “dark stores” or cloud stores, where personal shoppers fulfill online orders, offering fast, last-mile delivery. The market is dominated by grocery and essential goods deliveries, often fulfilled within an impressive timeframe. With a densely populated urban environment and a significant population of expatriates, the UAE is becoming a prime environment for Quick Commerce growth.   Local providers are responding by enhancing app-based ordering and expanding their services beyond grocery items to include pharmaceuticals, home essentials, and even fresh foods.   Local special circumstances United Arab Emirates has a large expatriate population, many of whom are time-poor and willing to pay for convenience which has created a strong quick commerce market. Additionally, it is fueled by the hot climate in the region, due to which customers are often reluctant to leave their homes to shop.  Quick Commerce Analytics to Lead the Market  UAE’s competitive Quick Commerce landscape requires brands to prioritize performance monitoring through digital commerce intelligence and analytics. Here are some key areas where Quick Commerce analytics help drive product performance vs competitions: Track global & local competitors’ products performance vs yours across eCommerce platforms  Monitor Search of Search and Visibility Share across platforms & locations  Identify new opportunities -demographics or geographies to target in your market segment  Set market strategies based on insights & analytics  Enhance content to suit the local shoppers’ needs by identifying high-performing keywords  What metrics should brands track in Quick Commerce Analytics in UAE  Quick Commerce focuses on ultra-fast delivery, often within an hour or even less. Analytics helps identify any bottlenecks in the process. Real-time actionable insights allow brands to adapt. Monitoring Key KPIs such as pricing, availability, keyword share – discoverability, product detail page performance, etc. across platforms and geographies helps brand to stay ahead of the competition and leverage data-driven decisions.  – Pricing & Discount Trends  Real-time price tracker and comprehensive competitive analysis can help brand set dynamic pricing to ace the game on quick commerce and e-commerce platforms.   – Availability Monitoring  Keep Track of your stock availability across platforms and geographies at a granular level. Going out-of-stock can push your product into highly competitive marketplaces and platforms and lose brand credibility. – Content Analysis (Perfect page analysis) Keep your product detail page title, description, product images of high quality and optimized can give a massive boost to visibility. On Quick commerce platform, it is mostly about the product title that it should pop up when searched. – Digal Share of Shelf Monitoring Key track of your share of search and presence on the digital shelf. Product discoverability is key to staying ahead of the competitors across the digital marketplaces. – Sponsored Banners Performance  Sponsored listing on e-commerce and quick commerce platforms is critical to reach the right audience. Automate the process of sponsored ad spend and bidding process to ensure your budget gets optimized not wasted.   Case Study: Monitoring Availability across Q-com platforms   Objective & Problem Statement: One of the biggest multinational F&B conglomerates wanted to measure, track and grow platform presence and stock availability in the AMESA region. They were already working with an ecommerce intelligence tool but suffered due to limited scaling capability and platform coverage. Moreover, they were not able to customize data insights for the brand.   mFilterIt Deployment: The F&B conglomerate had deployed mFilterIt e-commerce intelligence stack for its presence on all e-commerce and quick commerce platforms in the region. They monitored the products across multiple KPIs across the Middle East & North Africa region. In the UAE region they mainly focused on enhancing its market presence with monitoring availability and optimizing share of search.  mFilterIt Analysis & Inferences: In the UAE they focused on optimizing availability on key platforms Careem, Carrefour, Noon and Talabat for Beverages, Nutritious Food and Snack category.  Fig. 1: Before and after using mScanIt last year at multiple locations on Q-commerce platforms They identified and acted on performance gaps with global dashboard monitoring availability and other core KPIs. With limited availability and platform presence they were losing out on sales. As they started tracking zip-code wise availabilities, the internal teams could be activated for improved performance in every region. This led them to optimize availability versus competition across platforms and geographies on various categories and sub-categories. With growth of around 41% in availability share across platforms the brand expanded its presence and reached the shoppers.   The first checkpoint on optimizing the customers is staying in the race – prevent stock out. The brand grows availability at the dark store level to make sure the availability doesn’t fall behind the competition. A momentary lapse in availability can lead to losing a potential customer. Frequent stock-outs also affect brand reputation

Rise of Quick Commerce in UAE: Are You Monitoring Where You Stand vs the Competition? Read More »

ad fraud solution

How Lead Punching Fills Your CRM with Junk Leads—and What You Can Do About It

Imagine a bucket with a small but constant leak. You pour water daily, yet the water level barely rises. Running lead campaigns with junk leads in your CRM is similar.   You’re investing resources, yet the actual value doesn’t grow. Junk leads, like leaks, waste resources, and hold back growth, leaving your team stretched and chasing unqualified prospects.  For a digital brand investing heavily, the pain point is clear: valuable marketing and call center resources are wasted on unproductive leads, reducing campaign efficiency and conversion rates. One of the sure-fire methods is lead punching used by fraudulent publishers to get money out of advertisers.   The only catch here is – Lead punching only helps these publishers get money, the advertisers are only left with false, or junk leads.   What is Lead Punching? Lead punching is one of the fraudulent practices used by dishonest publishers or affiliates to deliberately submit false lead information, using real names, phone numbers and email ID of a person. This information is easily accessible across multiple sources at a minimal cost, which makes it easy for fraudsters to exploit. They use this data to fill out lead forms, ensuring the details appear legitimate.   However, in reality the real person is not aware of filling in the lead form or even having interest in the service. Therefore, when the sales team follows up, these supposed leads deny submitting any form or even knowing about the company.    This forms easily 30-40% of the total leads which a typical client receives. So not only is the advertiser losing media budget by paying for these junk leads, but they also end up burning call center costs in calling up these leads. Marketing teams also add these leads into a CRM and do Email / WhatsApp marketing on these. Now they waste further money in reaching people who have no interest in their products.   Many advertisers try to implement CAPTCHAs and OTP to prevent bot-driven leads. However, these techniques can also be bypassed. Using disposable phone numbers, OTPs can be bypassed. There are also Captcha solvers available at just one click.  Therefore, implementing these checks cannot guarantee clean leads.   How does it impact CRM health?   – You waste marketing spend on irrelevant leads When marketing budgets drive unqualified traffic, a significant chunk of that spend is essentially wasted. Over time, these costs add up, creating a heavy financial toll on lead generation campaigns that fall short of delivering qualified prospects.  – Your call center team spends time calling irresponsive and irrelevant leads Junk leads consume precious time, especially for call center teams and sales representatives. Every call, follow-up, and email sent to an unqualified lead diverts resources from real prospects, reducing the efficiency and morale of your team.  – You miss the 5-minute rule According to this rule, the chances to connect with a prospect increases 100 times when connected within 5 minutes instead of waiting for an hour.  With resources tied up on low-quality leads, high-potential prospects might get lost due to delayed follow-ups or overlooked engagement. Junk leads indirectly lead to missed revenue opportunities by diverting the attention of your team.  – Your brand name loses credibility Repeatedly reaching out to leads who lack interest can be a poor reflection on your brand. In some cases, it may even create negative associations if potential customers perceive your company as inattentive or misaligned with their needs.  Strategies to Eliminate Junk Leads and Focus on Quality  Taking control of your lead quality requires a well-structured approach, integrating technology and a clear strategy at each step of the funnel. Here’s a roadmap to clean up your lead pipeline and prioritize high-value prospects.  1. Clean Traffic and Fraud Prevention  Start by eliminating invalid traffic sources and preventing fraud with real-time validation tools. Filtering out traffic that doesn’t meet quality standards early on ensures that only leads with genuine potential enter the funnel. By removing these invalid visits at the start, you create a cleaner foundation, setting the stage for more effective lead nurturing and conversion efforts.  2. Intent-Based Visit Analysis  Once you’ve ensured traffic quality, dive deeper by analyzing the intent behind each lead’s visit. Look at the behavior of leads on your website—time spent, pages visited, and actions taken. This stage is crucial for gauging how interesting a lead truly is. Intent-based analysis lets you sort out window-shoppers from those genuinely interested in your product or service, allowing your team to prioritize leads that show clear signs of potential.  3. Lead Scoring and Validation with CRM Integration  For an optimized lead funnel, integrate your CRM with automated lead scoring tools that assess demographic data, engagement level, and previous behavior. Leveraging AI and ML-based technology, you can assign scores to leads based on these criteria, making it easy to prioritize high-potential leads. With a streamlined CRM, your sales team can focus their follow-ups on leads more likely to convert, saving time and increasing productivity.  4. Funnel Optimization and Junk Lead Filtering  With a system in place to identify quality leads, refine your funnel by regularly reviewing and tweaking the criteria that classify leads. By tightening filters and adjusting scoring parameters, you can progressively reduce the entry of junk leads, creating a cycle of continuous improvement in lead quality.  How mFilterIt validate leads on the CRM?   mFilterIt’s solution empowers advertisers with transparent, data-driven insights into CRM data. By collecting key metrics—such as website behavior, sales funnel, revenue, and attribution data—this mechanism uses advanced AI & ML algorithms to analyze each lead’s journey. The unique rule engine provides in-depth conversation and attribution analytics, categorizing users by intent (high, moderate, or low). This user-intent scoring, combined with visit analytics, gives advertisers clarity on lead quality and helps optimize campaign efforts. The solution enables brands to focus on high-intent leads, ensuring accurate reporting and maximizing ROI from their CRM data.  Clean Your CRM with Advanced Technology  For marketers, the focus shouldn’t just be on generating leads but on ensuring the quality of each one. By investing in

How Lead Punching Fills Your CRM with Junk Leads—and What You Can Do About It Read More »

impression

Impression Validation: Ensuring Your Ads Reach the Right Audience

In the world of digital advertising, getting your ads seen isn’t enough, you need to ensure that the ad is seen by your targeted audience. It’s about making sure those impressions—when someone sees your ad—are valid and genuinely reaching the right audience. This is where impression validation becomes crucial. It’s the process of verifying that your ad impressions are not only seen but also viewed by the right people who have a higher likelihood of engaging with your content. Why impression validation matters: Eliminating Fake Views The digital advertising space is vast, and not all impressions are created equal. In some cases, ads may be shown to bots, low-quality traffic, or irrelevant audiences. Impression validation helps you filter out these “fake” impressions, ensuring that real people who are interested in your product or service are the ones seeing your ads. This helps you avoid wasting your budget on views that don’t matter. Understanding User Intent Validating impressions is also about understanding how likely a viewer is to engage with your ad. Are they truly in your target demographic? Did they spend time on your page after seeing the ad, or did they scroll past it without a second glance? fraud Detection help assess these behaviours to ensure your ads are reaching the most relevant audience. Optimizing Ad Spend By validating your impressions, you’re able to allocate your budget more effectively. Instead of throwing money at impressions that aren’t adding value, you can focus on those that are likely to drive conversions. This leads to a better return on investment (ROI) and more meaningful interactions with your audience. In the end, impression validation isn’t just about counting views—it’s about ensuring your ad budgets are well spent by reaching the right people with genuine potential to convert into a lead or generate a sale. By focusing on valid impressions, you can optimize your campaigns for greater success and better engagement. To learn more about impressions validation, reach out to mFilterIt.

Impression Validation: Ensuring Your Ads Reach the Right Audience Read More »

image

Click Tracker: How Accurate Click Tracking Can Save Your Ad Campaign

Digital advertising demands proactive measures to ensure every click is measured and validated.  Approved Click Trackers are now mandatory if anyone wants to track p-max or demand gen campaigns. However, click tracking needs to be backed up with comprehensive monitoring to ensure genuine engagements that reflect the impact of an ad campaign. This is the gap fraudsters exploit manipulating clicks to divert ad budgets without driving real results  Let’s explore what advertisers can do to for click protection, ensuring click integrity and the role of efficient click tracker.   Why use a Click Tracker?  Click Tracker approved by Google helps advertisers track clicks on their ads while maintaining compliance with Google’s advertising policies.   Compliance with Google policies ensures the prevention of malicious or deceptive tracking practices that could negatively impact user experience. Google-approved click tracker meets these standards, ensuring that ad clicks are tracked accurately and provide enhanced transparency. This helps reduce the risk of ad abuse and misreporting, which could otherwise cost advertisers money and distort performance metrics.  Click trackers enable advertisers to monitor ad performance precisely by tracking user behavior. This data includes metrics such as conversions, session duration, and user journey, allowing marketers to better understand the effectiveness of their campaigns and optimize accordingly. Since Google’s ad platform integrates seamlessly with approved click tracker advertisers can implement these tracking solutions without compatibility or functionality issues. By accurately tracking ad clicks and subsequent actions, advertisers gain valuable insights into which keywords, ad formats, and targeting options drive conversions, ultimately leading to higher ROI and relevance through data-driven decisions.  Click Fraud Detection Our google-approved click tracker is more than just a click counter or measurement instead it’s an extension of our capabilities. The follow-up measurement should be clicking fraud prevention differentiating genuine clicks from fraudulent ones with advanced algorithms to analyze traffic, identifying patterns associated with fraud, such as repetitive or high velocity clicks from the same source, and filters them out.   mFilterIt can help advertisers gain visibility into every stage of the conversion funnel, from initial clicks to meaningful user actions. Safeguard ad budgets from making payout for fraudulent clicks and ensures engagements are genuine.  Preventing Click Spam Click spam is where fraudsters generate fake clicks to earn ad revenue or inflate engagement metrics and skew campaign performance metrics. It makes analyzing ad campaign performance difficult with inflated numbers.   Combat click spamming using multi-layered analysis techniques that include deterministic, heuristic, and behavioral checks. This ensures clicks are coming from legitimate IPs or devices, detects suspicious patterns, like a high volume of clicks from a single source, indicating potential fraud. Looks deeper into user behavior to ensure it aligns with expected patterns, filtering out traffic that doesn’t show genuine user intent.   Effective click spam prevention ensures that ads reach genuine users who are more likely to convert, rather than wasting impressions on fraudulent traffic.  Ad Campaign Performance optimization Accurate measurement of clicks and conversions is crucial for assessing ad campaign performance and scaling effectively. Without a reliable click fraud protection, advertisers run the risk of making decisions based on inflated or inaccurate metrics. Click tracker provides the data necessary to analyze and evaluate campaigns with confidence, ensuring that reported clicks translate into real, user-driven events.  -Optimize Ad Spend By focusing on genuine conversions rather than inflated click numbers, ad spend is optimized toward high-quality traffic.  -Scale Campaigns Effectively Accurate data enables advertisers to scale successful campaigns without worrying about ad fraud undermining performance.  -Build Trust Transparent and accurate metrics foster trust between advertisers and their stakeholders, creating confidence in ad effectiveness.  Accurate and fraud-free metrics allow marketers to make data-driven decisions, increase ROI, and scale campaigns based on reliable results.  How mFilterIt help in Click tracking along with Full-funnel protection Brands heavily invested in online display and video ads across websites to build brand awareness and drive engagement. This ensures that transparency in the ad campaign is of utmost importance not just to safeguard ad spending but also to protect brand reputation.  One of the major challenges is when the companies notice a sharp increase in ad impressions and clicks on their ad campaigns, but the result is minimal impact on key engagement metrics. Such discrepancies suggested ad fraud was wasting the company’s budget and skewing data, making it difficult for their marketing team to understand genuine campaign performance and target the right audience.  mFilterIt ad fraud detection and prevention tools for a comprehensive approach to tackle ad fraud, identified and filtered out fraudulent activity across multiple dimensions, ensuring the company’s ad spend was optimized toward genuine engagement.  – Real-Time Conversion-Based Analysis  Analyzed traffic in real-time to detect abnormal patterns, such as sudden spikes in clicks from specific regions, devices, or IPs.  To complement click and impression verification, mFilterIt also tracks user interactions beyond clicks. By analyzing click-to-event conversions filtering out fraudulent clicks that did not lead to real user engagement, ensuring their ad spend was driving actual interactions and interest.  – Bot Detection and Elimination  Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are used to identify bot behavior, distinguishing between automated traffic and real users as bots often mimic human behavior. Our heuristic and behavioral checks flag them off and ensure swift blocking and blacklisting source with automated process.   – Domain and Ad Placement Verification Fraudsters disguise low-quality sites or non-existent domains to pass as premium inventory. mFilterIt ad verification tools helped ensure the company’s ads appeared only on legitimate, brand-safe websites by matching domain data, placement information, and ensuring alignment with the campaign’s target audience.  Conclusion Click tracker serves as a first line of defense, ensuring ad budgets are directed toward genuine traffic, followed by multi-layered full funnel approach with integrated brand safety to optimize campaign performance. It allows brands to measure click-to-event conversion, giving a clearer picture of campaign impact.   As digital advertising continues to grow, so does the need for mFilterIt Click Tracker and Valid8 for full funnel protection, ad traffic validation, ad fraud detection and lead optimization that

Click Tracker: How Accurate Click Tracking Can Save Your Ad Campaign Read More »

Scroll to Top