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ecommerce-competitive-intelligence

What Does Your Search Rank on Marketplaces Say About Your Brand?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

Turning visitors into customers starts with achieving high search rankings. The higher search rank directly results in high visibility and more probability of getting picked up by the shoppers. It is just like a physical shopping scenario where your product is placed at a perfect place to catch the shopper’s eye and at a distance to be easily picked up from the shelf. In an eCommerce marketplace, most shoppers buy the top product on the list unless they are looking for something specific not featured in the list. A higher search rank also means the product will be available to more shoppers online based on the search. The goal is to create an attractive Product page, grab shoppers’ attention – convert that add-to-cart decision to an instant buy. eCommerce platforms like Amazon use their own search algorithm to list a product that is completely different from Google’s. When a buyer searches for a product on Amazon, results are delivered through a two-step process. Firstly, they pull relevant results from their catalogue and then they rank them according to relevancy. They continually evaluate their algorithms using human judgments, programmatic analysis, key business metrics, and performance metrics. Here are some important things that your search rank on the eCommerce marketplace says about your brand 1. Identifies your product position vis-a-vis competitor product in the products category or sub-category The product with the best search rank on the digital shelf gets the highest visibility and, eventually, has a chance at achieving higher sales. The search algorithm of eCommerce marketplaces shows results based on historical purchases, best sellers, reviews & ratings, and other factors. Brands try their best to make their product easily discoverable, especially on the top keywords. One of the methods of optimizing the pages is by identifying the most relevant keyword for a specific product and product category on the product’s page. By doing so, they can evaluate the leader and measure their overall performance on the organic and sponsored search results. Analyzing the search results would show the top-ranking product under a category and enable making strategies around the same too. But a more diversified method of knowing the top performer and runner-up would include measuring search results across the platform, variants, pin code, and other levels. 2. Does your product have the best SEO? Or could the product achieve a higher organic ranking? Brands only select a few keywords on which they display their sponsored listings. One of the key components affecting the search rank of the digital shelf of the remaining organic product listings is SEO. Regularly monitoring such search results on the organic keywords helps to find the product with the best page optimization. Analyzing the top search results against the competitors enables brands to find the brand leading the search rank on the digital shelf. A higher search rank on organic results only requires efforts from marketers. So, the brand saves money whenever the product has a high search rank without additional bidding costs. This is how high search ranking will impact your business: Established authority and good reputation Round-the-clock promotion Higher Organic search traffic High-quality visitors and increased conversion Such product listings help brands to achieve a higher conversion rate. The biggest factors influencing page optimization include the images, video, title, description, and any other form of content in the hands of the brand. The most effective method of measuring the performance of each of these components is by analyzing them with the competitors. Once the results display the product pages with the best results, marketers can use the information to enhance the page performance for each listing. 3. Does your Product Listing have the Potential to Influence Customer’s Buying Decisions? The urgency to buy a product is higher on quick commerce apps like BlinkIt or Dunzo than on Amazon or Flipkart because they offer fast delivery. If you want brown bread and search for it, the tendency to buy from the top results due to urgency is the highest. Wouldn’t you agree? Maybe not, but many do the same. Most visitors across a pin code often see similar results on eCom apps, so the demand for products on the top search results is higher than others. Therefore, the top results often go Out-of-Stock (OOS) faster than others. The top results on Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces can change the buyer’s perspective. For example, if you searched for ‘shoes for men’ and saw a variety of sporty shoes, you might not go for a known brand and opt for a new one, just because of the design and features. The designs shown in the top results convince the online shopper that the results display the trending forms of shoes, and sport shoe buyers must have them. The top results on the keyword searches influenced the buyer’s perspective about the sport shoe designs. Final Thoughts The search rank of a product on sponsored and organic keyword-based results tells a lot of tales to brands and e-commerce marketers. Brands need to focus on the results of the digital shelf as it enables them to achieve higher visibility and, eventually, sales. Moreover, digital shelf analytics enables brands to understand more about the areas of improvement of their products. Measuring the product’s performance at this level would require measuring the performance of the competitors with real-time actionable insights. Our eCommerce competitive intelligence solution, mScanIt, is helping brands to measure the performance of their product pages. It also helps brand marketers to find factors enabling competitors to achieve higher results and earn the trust of customers.

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ecommerce-intelligence

3 Things to Consider While Writing Product Descriptions

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

Do you remember when you had to visit the nearest retail store (Kirana-wala) and check out the product’s qualities by reading its description? We still have an audience that does the same as their preferred choice. Product description in an e-marketplace, like Amazon or BigBasket displayed after clicking on a product listing. It is much more than the standard description written on a product’s label. It signifies the product’s audience, benefits or features, suitability criteria, and more. The question that ecommerce marketers come across while writing a compelling description is ‘How to make the product description convincing to potential customers?’. A convincing description would increase the buyer’s interest in purchasing and re-purchasing the same product while simultaneously increasing interest in exploring more about it. Here are the 3 things to consider for writing a great product description Leave No Room for Doubts If you have ever visited a clothing outlet in a shopping mall, you must have been greeted by a salesperson who can assist you in searching for a section or finding the product for you. The salesperson leaves no room for doubt and helps you out with every possible detail. Also, create a user-centric content product description that provide answers to all possible questions that a customer may have about the product Understand customer needs Evaluate customer reviews and Q&As Address every possible customer concern in description This would not just increase customer’s interest in purchasing the product but will give the existing shoppers a loud and clear message, ‘we are hearing your voice’. It also leaves no doubt in the minds of the buyers. Include All Essentials Convincing a customer to buy a product takes more than stating the benefits or features of a product. It demands showing off humbly. It requires stating the obvious and the not-so-obvious factors. The product description should have sufficient room for all the qualities, which also helps in removing repetition. Keep it precise and informative Use Story telling style – engage with facts and benefits Include all essentials that customer seeks For example, people searching for hiking backpacks would want to know its capacity, whether it is waterproof, materials, and ‘unsuitable for’ criteria. But, ensuring that everything the product offers is mentioned requires knowing the aspects mentioned in similar listings of your competitor. Sometimes, you may not regard a feature as desirable, but the competitor might use it to scale up sales of similar products. Our eCom Competitive Analytics solutihelps brands analyze product descriptions and discover the critical aspects through a word cloud. The most mentioned words often appear the largest and using them in their description helps in page optimization. Use high performing keywords for your brand Writing a similar description for almost similar products gives a wrong impression to the online shopper. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for regular buyers to distinguish between the products and makes buying decisions easier. So, it’s a slippery slope for ecommerce marketers whenever the demand for new product descriptions arises for similar listings. Keywords play a significant role in product discoverability on ecommerce marketplaces. An ecommerce marketer writing a one-paragraph description could include 2-3 keywords at the most. However, deciding the right keywords becomes essential as it can place similar listings together or under different search results. The best way to find the correct keywords would be to look at competitors’ listings. Doing so helps to know the approach they are following for similar listings of their products. Our solution, mScanIt, shows the top keywords used by your competitors along with your keywords. The analysis through mScanIt helps to know their most used keywords and measure whether their keywords have been used in your description or not. Conclusion A powerful product description can increase an online shopper’s interest in the product and convince them to buy it. Ecommerce marketers know that descriptions should be crisp, enriched with keywords, and scannable. However, eCom marketers should also include customers’ interests, all the ‘need-to-know’ aspects and know competitor’s keywords. Doing so would help to make a much better product description. Ecommerce Competitive Intelligence Solution helps brands to evaluate the differences between their product descriptions against their competitors. The analysis helps brand marketers to achieve their description goals and optimize their content for search engines.

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ecommerce-intelligence

Why Do Rating Matter to eCom Brands?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

Online shoppers judge a product through its ratings and impact purchase decisions The first and only way to know about customer experience in an eCommerce marketplace is through ratings. They are eye-openers. Product reviews and rating can make the customer interested in buying the product or scroll until a better product becomes visible. The importance of ratings is undermined by reviews, as they offer ‘textual’ feedback from online shoppers. However, many reviewers only submit product ratings and don’t write about their experiences. Brands have to incentivize customers to submit their feedback through offers, scratch cards, gifts, etc. Such customer experiences are also biased, as many brands clearly state, “give a 5-star rating and write a few words” in their lingo. Brands also run campaigns to acquire customer feedback on their products. They approach influencers to submit feedback on eCommerce marketplaces in text or video format along with the ratings. Moreover, they also ask influencers to create unboxing videos or product feedback for their Product Display Page (PDP). Implications of Ratings on eCom Products Customer’s Interest in the Product Let’s say an online shopper searches for ‘best smartphones under Rs 10,000.’ The top search results have a rating between three to five stars. Which one do you think the customer would likely prefer? While this is an open-ended and subjective choice, as it would also account for the brand, price, image, and other crucial aspects, the product’s rating will undoubtedly change the decision to visit the product page. The next step in a customer’s journey after searching for a product now depends on the ratings shown on the digital shelf. The product ratings are also displayed at the top of the PDP on most eCommerce marketplaces. It’s a signal to re-affirm the experience of online shoppers. Online Shopper’s Decision to Read Reviews If a product’s ratings are below three stars, an online shopper may not be interested in buying or even looking at the product. However, if it is between three and five stars, the decision to explore more about the online shoppers’ experience through reviews would substantially increase. Therefore, ratings have the power to impact an online shopper’s decision in two extreme directions. The need to have a positive rating is always a priority for eCommerce marketers. Online shoppers read more about the product if a product has a neutral or positive rating. It makes them more interested in the features or qualities of the product. It also removes their distrust of the brand, especially if they buy a product for the first time. Helps to Make Product Judgements A three-star-rated product informs online shoppers that the buyers could face problems and should not expect the best results. A four-star product rating states that ‘it’s almost up to the expectations given in the PDP.’ Now, it’s easy to know what to expect from a one, two, or five-star-rated product. Right? Online shoppers start judging the credibility of a product based on the rating. In most instances, people would always go for a four to five-star-rated product. (If you disagree, please comment and let us know your reasons). The eCommerce search algorithm understands that the highest-rated products under a category would interest a higher number of buyers. Therefore, most top search results include the best-rated products, which generally don’t go below three stars. Wrapping Up A product’s rating has a wide range of implications. They can either build an online shopper’s association with a brand or disassociate existing loyalists to competitive products. The need to have a positive rating for all eCommerce listings has become essential, as slight differences can alter customer buying decisions. Moreover, product ratings are a window into the customer experience. Poor ratings keep the customer’s interest in the product at bay, and good ratings uplift their enthusiasm to know more about the product. Our digital commerce Intelligence, mScanIt, enables brands to track their product ratings in real-time and measure their performance with the top competitors. The solution can also set alerts in case there is a sudden surge in ratings. Using the alerts helps brands to notify eCommerce managers to take swift action against an issue or find out the reason for positive publicity by checking the PDP.

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online-sentiment-analysis

How Reviews and Rating Impact eCom Sales?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

According to a study, products with at least five reviews have a 270% higher chance of a sale.  The number of stars in the rating and shoppers feedback are vital for every eCommerce marketplace be it Amazon, BigBasket, Flipkart or any other. The heating up race to grab attention of buyers via multiple images, attractive prices, product comparisons, reviews & ratings are helping buyer to make more and more informed decisions. The customers feedback & reviews help buyers learn more about the product quality, brand, seller, features, benefits, etc. The sentiments and personal experience shared by the buyers makes reviews worth reading. According to research, about 91% of online shoppers read reviews before making a buying decision. The online shoppers want to know pros and cons of a product before deciding to buy. The negative feedbacks help judge the authenticity of the product, the core problems, irregularities, and more. On the other hand, positive reviews help build brand or product trust & credibility by stating the best features and clearing doubts about value for money. Why businesses need to assess customers sentiment? Reviews and ratings also influence marketing decisions. Brands often analyze the product with the worst feedback to find customers’ most problematic areas. Addressing customer concerns often helps brands to convert overall negative sentiment into positive or at least turn them into neutral. As a result, the new buyer decisions also get influenced in a positive way. The regular monitoring of reviews can help brands enhance their customer experience and develop new ideas or features. An evaluation of your brand vis-a-vis the competition can help to identify the most used words by customers for similar products on an ecommerce marketplace. This analysis helps in optimizing the marketing strategies. Brands need such analysis for optimizing the marketing strategies. Our solution mScanIt can even provide real-time alerts if the sentiment intensity is moving towards the extreme, keeping a tab on customer sentiment. Replying to customers reviews & ratings in real-time often results in a higher conversion rate. Impact of online reviews Boosts SEO and Product Discoverability Ease of finding the product listing on an eCommerce marketplace is crucial to product discoverability. Discoverability is directly proportional to Share of Shelf (SOS). So, when the keywords targeted by the brand appear higher, it enhances the share of Shelf. Most eCommerce marketplaces’ algorithm includes reviews and ratings to find out how relevant and popular the product is, before displaying the results to the online shopper. The targeted brand keywords used in the reviews also boost SEO. For example, a Bluetooth headset review would contain words like best Bluetooth, wireless, hands-free, etc., as part of the feedback. As these words are the SEO keywords, it might help the product become more visible in the top page listings. The product may also appear in the duplicate listing under organic search results of hands-free and wireless because these have been mentioned in the reviews. eCommerce marketplaces understand the importance of reviews and display them before the product price in search results. Products with reviews on the digital shelf listings often achieve higher conversion rates, depending upon the price parameters of the buyers. Products with good reviews and ratings on online shopping stores often boost their organic SERP on web browsers which leads to higher visits to the product display page, conversion rate, and sales. Additionally, they alter the Share-of-Voice of brands on Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines. Even if the product is new to the online shopping platform, lack of review will affect its sales unless it is of a well-known brand or much anticipated product. The businesses continuously engage in campaigns for acquiring product reviews as in most instances, people want to see the customer experiences of the same product from other online shoppers before deciding to purchase the product. Build customer trust and loyalty Products with reviews and ratings instill trust in a brand or eCommerce seller. The likelihood of purchasing an item from an online shopping store increases as the customer trusts the brand’s reliability and resolutions. Brands use eCommerce competitive analytic solutions like mScanIt for monitoring positive and negative sentiments with such tool they can evaluate customer reviews in their marketplace dashboard and send instant responses. Brands that proactively respond to customer reviews often witness higher conversion rates and sales. Simultaneously, they may boost customer loyalty and trust of potential buyers on the products, as they can see the resolution offered by the brand to resolve customer problems. The subjective view and understanding of the product usability also resolve frequent queries of the potential buyers, which once again impacts loyalty, trust, and the final buying decision. Help customers make final buying decision Many marketers believe that people spending a long time on a product page are probably checking the specifications, measuring pros & cons, and matching them with their needs before making the final buying decision. Reviews and ratings are opinions or comments given by product buyers and influencers which often include the brand name. The increasing number of brands mentions indeed impacts the algorithm of the eCommerce marketplace, especially while curating the best results for its buyers to boost sales. When the viewer read about other customer experiences, and name dropping of brands in reviews build a subjective opinion about the brand or product. Do you recall when ‘Realme was first introduced into the market, and people slowly forgot about ‘Redmi? Brands also use reviews for showcasing customer experiences to potential buyers or target audiences. You might have come across shopping ads on social media and search engines. Did you scroll past a new brand after seeing the reviews, or did you check out its product page? The length of reviews and ratings goes beyond the eCommerce sphere. Many websites have full-page articles and videos on products offered in online shopping stores. The brands also highlight ratings in product images to boost page time on their product page. Buyers sentiment matters! Reviews and rating could be a great tool to understand

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brand-protection

Know How Your Brand is Under Threat Due to Incent Campaigns

Leave a Comment / Ad Traffic Validation, Blog /

Marketers have come a long way in the journey of advertising. In traditional advertising, marketers use mediums like television, radio, and billboards to advertise. These mediums were effective but had their limitations. With traditional advertising, targeting the right audience has always been a black box. Digital advertising came with a broader opportunity for advertisers. It has helped brands to reach the right audience and track the performance to optimize the campaigns better. As digital advertising broadened its horizon, many options came into the limelight. One of them being affiliate marketing. Let’s understand Affiliate marketing in detail: What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is the method of marketing where an affiliate earns a commission from the advertiser against every action taken by the customer. Affiliates either run PPC campaigns to drive users to the advertiser’s website or use their audience or influence to increase the awareness of the advertiser’s product. The Shift in The Advertising World Digital advertising has evolved drastically over the past few years. Earlier digital advertising was limited to search and display campaigns. Today, marketers are broadening their horizons by considering varied advertising opportunities in the digital space. Many social media-based campaigns or incent campaigns have also emerged as a possibility for digital advertising. Incentivized campaigns are often referred to as a form of advertisement where every action is driven in exchange for a reward. For example, download an app and get Rs. 50 cashback. The loophole in Incent Campaigns Many affiliates run incentive campaigns to increase their revenue and fool the advertisers. They run incent campaigns on messaging platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp to reach a larger audience and make the advertisers think they are getting high traffic. Incent campaigns sound like a win-win situation for marketers as it helps them grab more users. However, in reality, only the affiliates win. How do affiliates keep you in the dark? 1. Showing High Installs The affiliates use incentive campaigns to lure users into installing the app in exchange for a reward. This way the affiliates help the advertisers get high installs and make them believe their campaign is performing well. However, the users installing the app are often interested in the reward instead of the app. The users often uninstall the app after a few days, resulting in a high uninstall rate and low lifetime value. In the end, the advertisers fail to connect with genuinely interested users and waste their budget on paying affiliates for installs that don’t add value to the business. 2. Faking Events To grab the interest of users, affiliates post offers with incorrect messaging. They often use shiny offers to lure customers into taking action to ensure they meet the KPIs. For example, “Make your first transaction and get Rs. 30 instant cashback”. Based on this, the advertiser makes the payment to affiliates based on events received. (In this case, making the transaction). However, the quality of users is low as they take the action only to avail the benefit. Real Case of One of the largest private sector Bank of India Incentivized campaigns were live on Telegram for one of the largest private sector banks in India where users were lured into downloading the app by offering them cashback. Users were also asked to do a 1 Re transaction so that publishers’ KPI could be met. Some of the messages we found on telegram groups: Solution Against Incent Fraud We at mFilterIt use our advanced brand protection solution to track the platforms running incent campaigns. Using our capabilities of AI, ML, and data science, we provide a transparent report of the affiliates running incent campaigns on Telegram and WhatsApp groups. Using our report, the brands can either penalize or block the fraudulent affiliate. Collaborate with Confidence Affiliate marketing is a strong channel of marketing to widen your audience reach. With the right partner to detect fraudulent affiliates, you can partner confidently and take your business growth in the right direction and leverage the benefits of affiliate marketing

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ecommerce-intelligence-solution

Why is Seller Analysis Important for eCom Brands?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

The eCommerce marketplaces have become hotspots for brands to ensure they capture the maximum market share through their omnichannel approach. To execute this, brands have two options, sell online directly or appoint authorized sellers. Unfortunately, there is one more category of sellers that are unauthorized or third-party (3P) sellers and they tap into the same eCommerce marketplaces and drive away the potential customer base towards their listings. The issue with third party sellers is that you can’t control them for the activities they are performing on the platform. To start with, they don’t necessarily provide genuine products of the brand. In fact, they continuously find ways to increase their financial base by enlisting counterfeit listings actively. Although the bigger issue with such sellers is that they continuously engage in Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) violations, which lead to many repercussions to brands, including damaged brand reputation, loss of genuine/authorized sellers, etc. The biggest disadvantage of MAP violations through unauthorized sellers is that it destroys the price parity of the brand and creates consumer distrust in the brand. Moreover, loyal consumers may ignore the brand’s product listings, opt for alternatives, or go to another store to find better products. When consumer’s product demand from authorized sellers is diverted on eCommerce marketplaces by 3P sellers, the demand and supply relationship between the brand and its sellers is also affected. This unexpected change in demand and supply often leads to overstocking, which is more dangerous in case of perishable products. Third party sellers also take the maximum benefit when brands run out of stock, and they scale their sales creating more damaging situation for brands. While these might seem concerning to you as a brand, the story doesn’t stop here. 3P sellers also engage in copyright and brand infringement by using images, content, or videos of genuine products to sell their counterfeits without the brand’s permission. The eCommerce marketplaces, like Amazon, Flipkart, Shopee, Lazada, etc., have also been flooded with sellers of lookalike products. What Should Brands Do to Monitor their eCom Platform Sellers? Monitoring sellers across eCommerce platforms to flag unauthorized sellers is challenging. To cater to this major issue of eCommerce players, we help them with our  Digital Commerce intelligence, mScanIt, to review seller activities in real-time. mScanIt has capabilities to perform Seller Analysis that reveals the stock availability of products across eCommerce platforms. Brands can use the list of sellers on each platform, the type of products they are selling, the stock availability of sellers, and more. Also, the solution can help brands in identifying which seller is winning the buy box. By reviewing these details in real-time, brands can detect unknown sellers and check out their activities on different eCommerce platforms. Simultaneously, a brand can view and compare the product availability of 3P seller’s vis-a-vis authorized sellers within a time frame. If the percentage of product available with authorized sellers is lower than the 3P sellers, consumers could opt for products from alternate sellers or even visit alternate stores. The scenario is persistently noticed in the FMCG industry, as grocery is an everyday need of consumers and is one of the categories with the highest demands since the launch of Quick Commerce (Q-Com) brands and apps. Brands can leverage mScanIt to inform their Key Account Managers or Category Managers to report 3P or unauthorized sellers. Doing so would diminish the chance of MAP violations and effectively maintain the product price of different variants under multiple categories. Moreover, brands can know the exact sellers of their products functioning on eCommerce platforms. It would likely avoid copyright, trademark, and content infringement. Conclusion Seller analysis is an important facet of E-Commerce Competitive Analytics. Brands need to analyze the activity of their sellers to check their stocking needs. Simultaneously, they need to know the sellers active across E-Commerce platforms like Amazon, Blinkit, Flipkart, and others. The seller analysis is also important for eliminating counterfeit, unauthorized, or 3P sellers from the eCommerce platforms, directly impacting the trust between a brand and its consumers. Schedule a demo with us to learn about the advantages of the eCommerce Competitive Analytics solution for your brand.

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programmatic-advertising

Challenges In Programmatic Advertising: Know How You Can Combat Them

Leave a Comment / Blog, Programmatic /

Programmatic has brought a revolutionary change in digital advertising. With its complete automation process, it has made it easier for advertisers to get the best place for their ads. However, every change comes with its own set of challenges. It is a challenging decision for an advertiser to make a move toward the big and promising world of real-time bidding advertising. All the things are shiny, but certainly, some red flags can be avoided to get the best returns on the ad spends. Programmatic advertising has portrayed itself as the best solution to traditional advertising. However, some challenges make it hard for advertisers to trust the ad-tech ecosystem blindly. We’re here to spill the beans on how these challenges are directly impacting your ad campaigns and what you can do to protect them. Read along and ensure that your brand doesn’t have to be the victim of fraudulent practices and other limitations of programmatic ads in the future. Programmatic Advertising – Challenges & Solutions 1. Lack of Transparency Due to programmatic advertising, many publishers have emerged that attract a large audience. Though the ideal goal of an advertiser is to reach a wider audience, these publishers cause a major concern for brand safety. These sites are usually low-quality and spam sites which redirect irrelevant traffic to the campaigns and impact the brand reputation. In addition to this, lack of transparency in the programmatic also impacts the decision of ad budget allocation for an advertiser. As they are unaware of the real impact of the ad campaigns and where their ads are showing, they are unable to decide which campaigns are genuinely performing better. Solution To solve this problem, mFilterIt’s ad fraud solution ensures that your ad campaign doesn’t consist of fraudulent and invalid traffic. We detect the sources of the malicious traffic and blacklist the fraudulent IP addresses to prevent the impact on future ad campaigns. 2. Viewability Issues As defined by the International Advertising Bureau, ad viewability is a standard metric to measure viewable impressions. According to them, an ad is considered viewable when it appears at least 50% on screen for more than one second. This is a quantifiable metric to know the percentage of ads that are viewed by real people. However, in programmatic advertising, many factors impact the viewability of an ad. Some of the factors are audience targeting, platform choices, and context which determines that the ads are shown to the right audience in real time and place. Solution Our Ad fraud software ensures that your digital ads are viewable to the targeted audience. Our solution also detects the ad placements on brand unsafe placements, masked websites, and sets of devices used for ad impressions. 3. Advertising Fraud & Bot Traffic According to a stat, “37% of ad buyers are worried about ad fraud”. And it has become a serious cause of concern in programmatic advertising. In the programmatic ecosystem, the landscape is littered with abusive vendors, non-human traffic sources, and click bots. And it’s an escalating problem because if you are basing your Return on Investment (ROI) on soft KPIs like impressions or views, then it is quite easy to fake fraudsters. In 2021, the traffic coming from bad bots accounted for 27.7% according to Statista. If taken the right measures to detect and prevent ad fraud, advertisers can get access to more accurate data and get a greater return on their ad spends. Solution To ensure that your ad campaigns are not impacted by fraudulent traffic and other ad fraud techniques, partner with an ad fraud detection tool provider like mFilterIt. Our fraud prevention and detection  ensures to detect bot patterns and other fraud categories in your ad traffic and takes preventive actions to provide cleaner traffic. 4. Impact on Brand Safety  Beyond the viewability issues and ad inventory problems, one of the biggest challenges with programmatic advertising is its impact on brand reputation. Beyond the revenue, if a brand’s reputation comes at stake, it can create havoc and ruin its image in front of its consumers. Apart from checking the quality of your traffic, a brand needs to ensure some additional things like: Where are your ads placed? What is the tone of your ad content? Is your content promoting anything illegal, scam, or fake? These checks are necessary to ensure that your ad doesn’t hurt the sentiments of your consumers and place you as a brand involved in illegal acts. Solution Keep a check on the placement of your ads and ensure that they are not showing on websites promoting violence, pornography, terrorism, fake news or hate speech. Conclusion Every revolutionary idea has its share of pros and cons. While Programmatic advertising comes with the above-mentioned challenges, it also comes with a plethora of benefits that can make a difference in the digital advertising space. To enjoy the best of both worlds, advertisers can take small steps to protect their ad campaigns and brand reputation. And while they do their part, an ad fraud prevention and detection solution provider like mFilterIt can help in making programmatic advertising a fraud-free space for your digital ad campaigns. By eliminating ad fraud in the programmatic space, advertisers can leverage the benefits of reaching the right audience and getting better returns on digital ad campaigns. Get in touch to learn more about programmatic advertising.

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ad-fraud

Are Your Digital Ad Campaigns Safe from Sophisticated Bots?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

The digital world is evolving rapidly, and marketers are moving from traditional platforms to digital platforms. But in this growing digital ecosystem, someone is hiding behind the screens to disrupt your growth. Behind all the pros of digital advertising, a manipulated truth is that marketers are unaware of who is coming to see their ad campaigns. To throw light on this, ad fraud solution providers have come into the limelight to validate how much invalid traffic is coming to the ad campaigns. However, just when the marketers were ready to combat ad fraud, cybercriminals expanded their fraud zone with sophisticated bots. Unlike the general bots, the sophisticated bots can replicate human behavior and hide easily behind the cloak of genuine traffic resulting in manipulated data. This again makes the marketer’s ad campaigns vulnerable to ad fraud. What is the solution?  Advanced Problems Need Advanced Solutions Once a sophisticated bot penetrates your digital ad campaign, it will not just impact one KPI but also manipulate your entire sales funnel and manipulate the data. For example, if you’re running an impressions campaign then first it will inflate the number of impressions with bot traffic. And once that is done, they will impact your hard KPIs like lead, conversion, or install. The result is that you not only waste your ad spend on invalid traffic but also open the gateway to your brand assets for the sophisticated bot army to attack and destroy. Thus, it is important to get a full-funnel ad fraud detection tool instead of a solution that covers just one KPI. Know in detail about the different types of sophisticated bots that are hard to detect on the web and app. And for the advanced solution, stick with us till the end of this blog. Sophisticated Web Fraud Techniques That Are Hard to Detect Imperceptible Window To improve the CTR of the site, the  fraudsters open the advertiser’s landing page to a zero-sized pixel. However, the end-user is unaware of this and when they visit the website it is registered as a click in google ads platform. The advertiser ends up paying for these clicks/visits which were not even seen by the user. Example of Page View Fraud In the above case, the user didn’t click on the advertisement, but a click has been registered. As the window size is imperceptible for the user, they are unaware of this case. Generally, it is difficult to detect these anomalies without the help of advanced data analytics capabilities. Cookie Stuffing Cookie stuffing is organic theft where a website drops one or more third-party cookies onto a user’s web browser. An Iframe of ‘0x0’ pixel is used to dropping a cookie to hijack the organic user. These malicious cookies thus incorrectly attribute the organic traffic to the fraudulent affiliate. In the above example, we have incorporated a mFilterIt pixel which drops a randomly generated cookie whenever a user visits the advertiser’s website for the first time. Upon the return of that user, the same cookie value indicates the return of the same user. We also observed that despite faking or rotating the IP, the bot device is returning the same cookie within a gap of a few minutes. Bot User Fake users or Bot emulated users usually don’t have any mouse movement or touch interactions. They are also programmed in a way where they don’t react to the advertiser’s landing page. In this case, where there is no user interaction, we use the capabilities of Machine learning algorithms combined with captured values like configurations, plugins, device settings, canvas fingerprinting, etc. This helps to analyze the bot patterns and cases where the clicks bots are happening at a high probability. With the help of AI, ML, and data science, we detected approximately 32k such cases just in the pilot phase. Sophisticated App Fraud Techniques That Are Hard to Detect Click Spam Click spamming starts when a user downloads an infected app on their device – or visits an infected mobile website. These infected apps are usually downloaded outside the walled gardens of the Play Store and IOS app store. The infected app has built-in code which is programmed to create clicks on ads or allow external devices to click within the app. The app works normally on the user’s device, except for the tiny code running click-spam activities in the background. This fraud technique generates click spamming from the user’s device without their knowledge. And the advertisers are under an impression that the clicks are generated by real users. Example of Click Spam In this case, clicks and installs are high whereas the conversion rate is as low as 0.01%. This is a clear case of click spamming. These clicks were generated in a time period of 9 days from Thailand. Surprisingly, the total clicks are equivalent to the population of the country. This kind of CTIT curve is often overlooked by the attribution platforms due to the clicks being refreshed in the background. At mFilterIt, we track the click patterns in case of click generating from the same device ID. Event Spoofing Event spoofing is one of the advanced fraud techniques used by fraudsters to manipulate the install data of advertisers. In this case, the fraudsters programmed bots that can fire fake clicks in the background to capture the events. This eventually leads to an event being spoofed and attributed without a legitimate install. This results in the advertiser believing that a legitimate install happened. However, in reality, no event has occurred. The events like bookings, purchases, signup, registration, etc. are required to be analyzed thoroughly to identify in-app fraud. Example of Event Spoofing In this case, the CTIT is distributed within a few minutes, which is unusual. The normal traffic pattern is spread over as the conversion time is usually not in the control of the publisher. mFilterIt’s Full-Funnel Model – Our Advanced Solution How We Protected a Global Pharma Player Across the Funnel A premium pharma company noticed that their impressions were high, but the number

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Can Ad Fraud Detection Stop Your Brand’s Growth? Know the Truth

Leave a Comment / Ad Traffic Validation, Blog /

Ad Fraud is a term that has shaken the entire digital advertising ecosystem in the past decade. Every year, fraudsters are becoming sophisticated and smart in stealing revenue from advertisers. Whether it’s advertisers, publishers, or ad networks, no one is safe from the threats of cybercriminals. The legitimate publishers get their genuine clicks stolen by fraudsters. Whereas the ad networks have to see their performance suffer and campaigns fail. And the worst of all happens with the advertisers as they pay for both invalid users and organic downloads. In this fight between the fraudsters and the digital marketing ecosystem, myths make the advertisers question the ad fraud detection vendors while the fraudsters feed on their money. Here is another myth that is making noise lately. In this blog, we are busting this myth with some facts which will help you understand the importance of an ad fraud detection software. What is cooking? In the digital advertising world, publishers are spreading the word that they are not able to scale an advertiser’s business due to ad fraud detection solutions. However, the reality is different Publishers lose a high percentage of their revenue due to ad fraud detection solutions. For instance, if an ad fraud preventive service provider detects 70% of fraud coming from a specific source, then that particular publisher receives a payout on just 30% of the genuine traffic by the advertiser. Publishers & MMP union Some of the renowned Mobile measurement platforms (MMPs) also offer ad fraud detection services clubbed with their attribution services. They claim that they will detect fraud in the data attributed by them to an app advertiser and ensure that they receive clean traffic. However, there is a catch. The MMPs bill the advertisers based on the number of attributions. Hence, if the MMPs detect a higher number of frauds on the attributed data, they will lose revenue. Therefore, to ensure that their revenue is not impacted, the MMPs detect 10-12% of the fraud and the rest of the fraud remains undetected. This benefits the MMPs and the publishers as they can claim higher payout from the advertisers. As the MMPs detect low fraud, the publisher encourages the agencies, advertisers, and other stakeholders to use the MMP ad fraud detection as it will eventually benefit them. This is similar to a situation where the culprit is telling to choose where to go and file a complaint to keep themselves safe. And listening to this, the advertisers fail to detect the real fraud and end up losing huge revenue. What do advertisers miss? Real % of Fraud: Due to less fraud reporting by MMPs, the advertisers remain in the dark regarding the actual fraud numbers. This further affects the performance of the ad campaigns, and the advertisers end up losing money twice to invalid traffic. First, they lose money to the invalid traffic before ad fraud solution. Later, they end up losing money on invalid traffic that is not reported by the MMPs. Growth Opportunities: The advertisers use an MMP to measure the performance and get analytical data for their campaigns. However, due to less fraud reported by MMPs, the marketers stay under the impression that their campaign performance is good. Furthermore, as the marketer takes decisions based on this skewed data, they end up investing more in the wrong campaign. This further hampers the overall growth of the business. mFilterIt Vs MMPs In comparison to the fraud detection done by MMPs, we ensure holistic protection of advertisers from ad fraud. Our ad traffic validation suite enables: Full-Funnel Protection MMPs can detect the general bots, but they often miss to detect the signs of sophisticated bots in an ad campaign. As sophisticated bots can easily mimic human behavior, they are hard to detect and require an advanced solution. With our full-funnel approach, we detect sophisticated bot patterns in real-time to help advertisers take immediate action to curb the impact. Detect New Bots Across Domains Every day a new bot is coming, and it is hard to detect across all platforms and domains. MMPs often lose the time to respond to the threats as their systems and rules are updated once in 6 months or a year. Whereas we detect a new bot on any campaign, we ensure to flag it across all the advertisers/campaigns. This results in the protection of ad campaigns from the impact of the new bot. Proactive Reporting The attribution platforms provide a late ad fraud report to the advertisers. This means that if the ad fraud is detected by the 20th of a month, then the advertisers will receive the report on the 28th of that month. This further delays the process of taking preventative measures against fraudulent sources. Furthermore, it also affects the invoicing and closures at the end of the month, and even after taking so much time they fail to detect the right number of fraudulent sources. Whereas we provide D-1 data, which means that if the fraud is detected by the 20th of the month, the advertiser gets the report on the 21st of the month. This helps the advertiser to understand the possible impact of the ad fraud and take preventative measures immediately without wasting further ad spends on irrelevant traffic. Early reporting also helps publishers to optimize better and reduce the threat of fraud. Forget the Myth, Believe in Facts With the fast-growing world of digital ad fraud are making their every move smarter, more discrete, and an illusion to the naked eye. To ensure your marketing efforts are not wasted, it is important to fight against fraudsters with an advanced ad traffic validation solution. A reliable ad fraud detection and prevention solution will help to detect fraud in real time and provide holistic protection against sophisticated bots without impacting your growth. The only party affected is the publishers as their pay-out decreases when an effective ad fraud tool is in place. It’s time to believe the data, not the myths. Get in touch with our experts for deeper insights. Reach out to learn

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Amazon Best Seller: What it Takes to Get This Badge?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics /

Most online shoppers searching for a product on Amazon consider the best seller as the most reliable product in terms of quality and usage. The shopper believes such products would have the highest positive reviews and ratings and would match the expectations mentioned on the product page. The best seller badge on Amazon is given to a product with the highest sales volume in a certain time period.  The badge is often given to new products every hour. The best seller badge further helps to achieve higher sales more easily. In addition, the product appears in the top ten search results and, therefore, acquires higher visibility than its competitors. Getting the best seller badge would require increasing the visibility of products so that more customers can find and purchase the product. The product discoverability and position on the search rank can get enhanced by optimizing the page title, images, and description. They play a crucial role in convincing the shopper that the product is worth it’s price. The story doesn’t finish here. Amazon also has a Best Seller page, wherein the top selling products under a category are shown along with their ranking. The product with the highest rank often appears more times than others on the organic and sponsored search results of Amazon. Sometimes, the products from this list also become visible on unrelated keyword search results as well. Therefore, achieving the best seller badge is often a priority of ecommerce managers and retailers, as it helps to boost sales. How to Get the Amazon Best Seller Badge? Rank Higher on Organic Search and Sponsored Keywords Product visibility on ecommerce marketplaces influences buying decisions. The product with the highest search rank on organic and sponsored keyword search results would appear before its competitors. Most customers often go for a product appearing in the top ten results. Achieving a position in the top search results would require keyword optimization, title enrichment, and more. Measuring your product’s performance against the top competitors in the ecommerce marketplace helps to find new areas of improvement and, ultimately, achieve the goal. For example, if you measure the performance of a product’s title with its top competitors and find that their title performance is higher than yours. Now, your ecommerce brand marketers could look at the competitors’ page titles and find factors influencing the performance. Our ecommerce competitive analysis, helps brands to find areas for improvement. Brand marketers use the insights to enrich the product page title and increase the search rank on keyword search results. Find the Category in Which Your Product Can Give Tough Competition A product on Amazon can be a part of multiple categories and choosing the best one makes all the difference in the world. At times, you might be tempted to enlist the product under an irrelevant category because they offer the lowest competition. Enlisting a product in such a manner can signal wrong message to the online shopper and make them disinterested in it. As such, the best way to get the best seller badge is to find a relevant sub-category or niche offering the lowest competition. Your sales might slightly get affected, but the chances of shoppers bouncing off your product page would significantly decrease. Moreover, you could keep the best seller badge for a longer duration under the chosen category. But seasonal products like gift items, come under an exception to this guideline, as their sales don’t depend on category. Sometimes, sellers can achieve high sales and the best seller badge by placing seasonal products under an irrelevant category. Set up Promotions for the Product that You Want to Sell the Most Deciding the product that you want to sell the most on Amazon is not an easy choice for eCommerce managers. However, once the decision is made, the next step is to set up promotional campaigns such as ads, discounts, deals, etc., to boost sales. Display ads on eCommerce marketplaces grab the attention of even the browsers and turn a few of them into customers. Similarly, discounts or limited-time deals entice online shoppers to buy the product. Eventually, the increase in sales through the promotions helps the product get the best seller badge. We would also suggest you run promotions under categories wherein Amazon’s private label brand has the least competition, as they undoubtedly have the upper hand otherwise. Getting the best seller badge would become much easier under such categories. Our solution, mScanIt, also enables global brands to achieve real-time actionable insights on product promotions at category, platform, and other levels. Finding the ongoing product promotions of the competition becomes much simpler with our solution. Implementing mScanIt’s actionable insights into the campaigns has also enabled brands to achieve higher sales. Conclusion It’s easy to say that all it takes to achieve the best seller badge is high sales volume, but attaining higher sales requires a lot of effort. Keyword optimization on product pages and finding the correct category are just a few methods for increasing visibility and sales volume. As the best seller badge is given to new products every hour, it has become essential to have a solution that can find tracks metrics affecting eCommerce marketplaces. mScanIt, powered by mFilterIt, is a new-age technology that helps brands to track product prices, product page scores, etc. Evaluating the results of own brand’s products versus the top competitor’s listings helps brand marketers take measures that can enhance the search rank and visibility, directly impacting sales. Get in touch with us to know more about the advantages of mScanIt for your brand.

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