Blog - mfilterit

Why is Seller Analysis Important for eCom Brands?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Praveen Dhama

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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Challenges In Programmatic Advertising: Know How You Can Combat Them

Leave a Comment / Blog, Programmatic / Expert Opinion

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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Are Your Digital Ad Campaigns Safe from Sophisticated Bots?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

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 / Jagmeet Singh

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 / Expert Opinion

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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Out-of-Stock: Just Lost Sales or More?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

The number of shoppers on established ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart is in billions. And thus, the movement of products in terms of sales is at large scale compared to any mom n pop shop. This large movement of products often lead to problem of out of stock (OOS) which can happen due to negligence at multiple steps of the value chain. Brand stakeholders and ecommerce retailers understand that the OOS is going to remain an ongoing problem. The increasing number of visitors to online shopping stores often impacts product demand. eCommerce managers use the best measures to forecast their product demand percentages before informing their authorized sellers of the inventory. Unfortunately, determining the exact product demand is a slippery slope for eCom managers, as the customers’ needs continuously change. The inaccurate forecast of product demand is also linked to other reasons. For example, if your brand is running an online campaign for a specific product and delay in informing the authorized retailers about increasing the inventory of the product. Under such circumstances, the retailers would update the stocks per the previously stated demand. A similar situation could arise if the brand stakeholders delay informing the retailers about updating the stocks of specific products. The unavailability of products on an ecommerce marketplace could also be linked to technical issues, non-compliance with a product page guideline, and other reasons. Although the stockouts reasons are concerning enough for a brand’s stakeholders, the repercussions are equally damaging and sometimes irreversible. OOS not only causes lost sales but also leads to lost customer loyalty and lower visibility on ecommerce marketplaces, to name a few. 3 Biggest Repercussions of Stockouts on Ecommerce Marketplaces Customers opt for an Alternative Product Shopping became easier with the introduction of the ecommerce marketplace. With the launch of quick commerce platforms like BlinkIt, Dunzo, and Zepto, even delivery has become faster. The ecommerce stakeholders continuously work on identifying and resolving the customer’s problem; however, OOS is an ongoing problem. Online shoppers have limited reactions whenever a product becomes out-of-stock. The online shopper may click the ‘notify me when available’ button or buy a substitute. As far as I know, the probability of waiting for a product, especially if it is grocery, is far less than most of the other categories. For example, the likelihood that a customer waits to buy brown bread of a particular brand when it is available is meager. The scenario is more common in quick commerce apps, especially when offering instant home delivery. Under this scenario, the brand has lost sale to competitors and will experience the same until the product become available. Brands Witness a Shift in Loyalty Once an online shopper buys a product and becomes exceptionally satisfied with it, the inclination to buy it repeatedly increases. Such buyers are often referred to as loyalists. But, when the product becomes unavailable on the ecommerce marketplace, one of the subsequent choices of the loyalist is to find a substitute. After using a competitor’s product, the loyalist may change their opinion about the previously bought item and compare its qualities with the new one. As a result, the brand’s loyal customer base shifts to competitors if the product is OOS. Brand stakeholders must expect a higher shift of loyalists towards their competitors if the product remains OOS most of the time. Hampers Search Ranks Significantly Products that become out-of-stock are removed from the search results of ecommerce marketplaces because they spoil customer experience and hamper sales. Instead, new products acquire their search rank and increase their visibility. On Amazon, even if an ecommerce manager updates the inventory, it takes 24-48 hours to review the changes and make the product listing visible to buyers. Re-acquiring the top search rank for the product listing becomes challenging, as the customer’s loyalty has shifted to a competitive product and the consumer’s interest in buying the new & regularly available product has increased. The search rank on ecommerce marketplaces depends on product purchases, best seller, SEO, and other factors. The search results algorithm of the ecommerce marketplaces recognizes the new products attracting the customer’s attention and its visibility as well as search rank improves significantly. Moreover, customers that had the product in their cart but faced stockouts during the final step of the purchase journey often leave negative reviews and ratings. Such feedback further hampers the search rank of the product listings and makes acquiring a high position on keyword search results more challenging. Conclusion We agree that the biggest issue of stockouts is loss of sale, but it also has many other repercussions. It shifts the customer’s loyalty to the competitive brand and hampers the search rank. Inaccurate demand forecasts, sudden demand surge and delayed reporting by inventory managers are the most prominent factors leading to OOS. Ensuring the correct availability of products with authorized online retailers requires diving deep into the stockout vs. stock availability percentages of your brand. It requires identifying the change in these percentages at SKU, platform, variant, and other levels every month . Such in-depth analysis enables brands to diminish their stockout percentage and enhance customer experience. Connect with us to learn the advantages of using our e-commerce competitive analytics solution, mScanIt Ecommerce Analytics Solution, for predicting your product availability at minuscule levels.

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How to Keep Your Brands Safe Online: Problems and Solutions

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability / Expert Opinion

What are the threats to your brand online? In what ways can image security and ad safety be incorporated into your brand protection strategy? Over time, your new business will develop a reputation. Sadly, one of the risks of business success is the possibility of plagiarism, hacking, and data loss. Once you become a household name, consumers are more likely to purchase your well-established brand. With fame comes responsibility such as fending off counterfeit criminals who seek to capitalize on your brand name. This article discusses how digital images and digital advertising can hurt the reputation of your brand. Furthermore, we demonstrate how a combination of security against image theft and contextual targeting can provide robust security. What is brand protection? Brand protection is a security measure to guard against pirates, counterfeiters, and intellectual property infringers. You can use it to protect your company’s image, reputation, and revenue. Intellectual property (IP) includes creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, as well as symbols, names, and images used in commerce. Brand infringement or brand abuse results from this unauthorized use. It can take various forms, ranging from counterfeiting to copyright infringement to brand impersonation. These tactics are designed to accomplish the same goal, which is allowing bad actors to exploit your brand’s reputation for their own benefit. The obvious consequence of this is the loss of revenue. What is arguably more important is that it can lead to trust erosion in your brand – and this can be devastating and lost lasting. Why protecting your brand online should be a matter of concern for you? Despite its widespread nature, brand abuse is well-established due to the rise of the internet. According to recent statistics, the global counterfeit goods market is estimated to grow to 2.8 trillion dollars by 2022. Through online shopping and auction fraud, UK residents alone lost £69 million last year. Because of the impersonal nature of online shopping and the internet’s global reach, fraudsters have been able to reach millions. Buying a product or service before e-commerce usually meant inspecting the product or speaking to a professional in person. It’s clear, though, that in modern times, we feel far more comfortable basing our buying decisions on what we see on screens with global retail e-commerce sales going from $1.34 trillion to $4.28 trillion by 2020. Can we really blame a less risk-aware shopper for clicking on the ‘buy’ button if the listing on a well-established e-commerce platform shows the correct logos, colors, designs, and sizes of a well-known brand? Digital images are used to abuse brands In order to convince online shoppers that a product is authentic, digital images are crucial. In a study, for example, 90% of shoppers rated the quality of photos as extremely or very important in their buying decisions. Figures like these highlight the importance of professionally taken images when it comes to building trust. Moreover, the threat goes beyond e-commerce listings. A fraudster could easily create a fake social media account, or even an entire imitation website, with high-quality, official brand photography freely available online. There are 137 million fake Facebook profiles, 5% of all Facebook profiles, and three billion phishing emails that typically send users to scam websites every day, which shows the scope of the problem. Damage to digital advertising Digital advertising is also a potential threat to your brand’s reputation – as reported by 99% of advertisers. Programmatic advertising has nearly eliminated human intervention in the ad-selection process. This complete automation has, on the one hand, improved efficiency for advertisers. On the other hand, it has resulted in a reduction in quality control, leading to big problems for both advertisers and publishers. Poor placement of ads Badly placed ads have become a common occurrence due to the ever-increasing complexity of online advertising. Only 2.8% of participants felt the last digital ad they saw was relevant, according to a study. It usually involves an ad showing up next to inappropriate content, and while it’s possible to find humour in unfair placements, there’s also a much more serious side. In a study, 70% of UK and 62% of US consumers said they would stop using a brand’s goods if its ads were near unsafe material. Ad placement, therefore, plays a critical role in the success of your advertising and, in turn, the protection of your brand. Errors in retargeting In retargeting, cookies are used to target users who have left a website without converting. You may have noticed that you were being retargeted online after searching for something one day and afterward seeing it everywhere. In some cases, digital advertising can be extremely effective, but it has some flaws. As an example, you may have rethought your decision since you visited the website, or you may have already bought the product in a store. It could even refer to a personal or sensitive product that you would prefer not to be reminded of. In either case, the outcome results in a disgruntled user, which is bad for advertisers and publishers alike. Bad ads Although bad content can have a detrimental effect on a brand’s digital ads, it can also work in the opposite direction. Ads with poor quality can be equally damaging to carefully curated content. In the digital world, the term ‘bad ads’ refers to digital ads that create a bad user experience. They may contain offensive or inappropriate content, advertise fraudulent products or services, or spread malware through a practice known as malvertising. Ads that do not work are problematic. Google alone removed and blocked 3.4 billion bad ads in 2021. Such an issue presents a real threat. Programmatic advertising’s anonymity allows bad actors to distribute this type of ad without being detected, so it’s imperative that you take the necessary security measures to protect your brand. Secure images to prevent brand abuse Securing all imagery associated with your product or service is an essential component of any brand protection strategy. The right protection prevents

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Are You Being Impersonated on Social Media? You’ll Need to Know This!

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Protection / Expert Opinion

The security of your customers is of the utmost importance to you and your organization. Consequently, cyber scams like brand impersonation and social frauds can and do harm businesses of all sizes. Approximately $5.3 billion has been lost worldwide as a result of impersonation attacks, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). If you steal sensitive information and money from your clients, this can erode their confidence in your organization and ultimately impact their trust in you. Here, we’ll examine the different types of impersonation and how brands can combat them. How does social media impersonation work? Impersonation or identity theft occurs when a person, company, or organization’s name, image, or other identifying information is used to commit fraud. In general, it refers to the act of pretending to be someone else on social media platforms. The practice of impersonating a brand or person on social media differs from other legitimate uses, including fan accounts, parodies, and information pages. Types of impersonation There are many forms of impersonation, from phishing scams to full-blown online fraud where you buy products from illegitimate sellers. Scammers often impersonate brands in these ways: Phishing: It is common for scammers to impersonate brands (or their employees) in order to obtain sensitive customer information, such as social security numbers, passwords, or bank account information. Among the industries most affected by these practices are the financial sector (particularly FinTech companies that tend to interact with their users on social networks). Counterfeiting: Brands’ fake pages are intended to deceive their consumers by selling inauthentic products. They often operate through aggressive advertising campaigns directed at brand consumers, redirecting them to a website outside the social network where the transaction occurs. Despite its relevance in a multitude of industries, this practice is particularly prevalent in the luxury and fashion sectors. Fake news: Accounts impersonating politicians, celebrities, public institutions, advertising agencies, and others, are used to spread false news and information. Scams: A lot of frauds on the Internet (coupons, romance fraud, 491 scams, account takeover, etc.) originate from identity theft through social networks. How do impersonators operate? Impersonators operate in different ways depending on their social network, their objectives, and their sophistication. It has been observed that different impersonation attacks exhibit some common behaviors: The number of impersonations a brand suffers and its social media presence are usually correlated. In one sense, brands without official accounts are often easy targets for fraudsters, who will attempt to exploit this gap to deceive their followers. Conversely, brands with more presence (followers, posts, campaigns, etc.) are also prime targets for impersonators, as they know there is a large base of customers to rip off. The impersonators often use the same photos, names, descriptions, posts, hashtags, etc. As the official accounts. Other common tactics include impersonating “support” or “customer service” pages, as well as running raffles and promotions. A few posts do not guarantee that a given account is risk-free: it could be sending private messages or running aggressive ad campaigns on the social network and redirecting those affected to external web pages. In some social networks, it takes several days for newly created accounts to appear in search results. During these periods, the most sophisticated impersonators launch very aggressive attacks, often through ad campaigns targeted directly at consumers of the brand. The type of social network strongly determines the type of impersonation. The likelihood of impersonating brand executives or employees is higher on social networks such as LinkedIn. The majority of impersonations on social networks such as Facebook occur through “Pages”, although sometimes they occur through “Profiles”, “Groups” or “Events”. In order to correctly identify the different types of impersonation, it is important to understand how each platform works and its audience. Is there a way to stop social media impersonation? The majority of platforms offer reporting tools for those affected, but they usually leave it up to brands to identify and report any impersonation. It is clear that the first piece of advice is to be proactive since no one will solve your problem for you. When dealing with social impersonation, the following considerations should be kept in mind: Automation: It is imperative that technology is used for daily tracking and reporting of violations in very serious cases. The key to detecting and reporting these accounts is consistency and speed. This prevents them from growing their follower base and causing damage. Broad Keywords: Additionally, searches should be conducted for all variations of the brand name (misspellings, separations, alphanumeric combinations, etc.). Observe hashtags and keywords frequently used by the brand. Logo recognition: The use of image and logo recognition models can help to identify the presence of logos and other distinctive brand signs in profile pictures, thereby eliminating false positives and determining criticality. Risk & Similarity scores: When prioritizing and choosing the best enforcement strategy, algorithms can help identify the importance of an account and the risk of confusion with an official account based on its parameters (name, description, photos, followers and followers, posts, opening date, etc.). As part of a comprehensive brand protection strategy, websites, domain names and app stores should be monitored in addition to social media. Conclusion Social media impersonation is a growing problem that affects thousands of brands and individuals across most platforms. There are risks involved, including loss of revenue and traffic, as well as reputational issues and loss of consumer trust. In order to identify and remove such infringements as quickly as possible, brands must take a proactive approach to the problem. Technology and expertise in intellectual property enforcement are key elements to ensure this strategy’s success. Your customers and reputation can be protected with mFilterIt’s Impersonation Removal solution, which uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify and remove fake websites, apps, and domains.

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How To Combat Bot Traffic with Google Analytics?

Leave a Comment / Ad Traffic Validation, Blog / Expert Opinion

The word ‘Bot’ can be both good and bad in the digital marketing ecosystem. There are good bots like the search engine crawlers which help to improve your website performance. On the other hand, there are bad bots that are used by cybercriminals to commit unethical activities like ad fraud and stealing advertisers’ ad spends. Half of the internet’s traffic consists of bots, of which 65% are bad bots. In recent events, bad bots have costed brands more than just money. The latest news of Elon Musk dropping out of a $44 bn deal with Twitter due to fake accounts is a sign of how deep-rooted the issue is. As a marketer, you need to be aware of who is visiting your website. When analyzing data, it is important to ensure that your data doesn’t consist of bot traffic. With the help of Google Analytics, you can detect and filter the bot traffic to see cleaner data points. Thinking about how to detect bot traffic on Google Analytics? We have included the most common tell-tale signs to detect bot traffic on your Google Analytics. 4 Signs to detect Bot Traffic on Google Analytics 1. Unusual Traffic If your website visit increases from an average number of 1,000 to 20,000 or you see a similar spike in a short interval of time without any marketing efforts or unknown reasons, it is not good news. Your website traffic is polluted with bots if you see a sudden spike in your website traffic, and there are certain things you might notice: Page views less than 1 second on single pages No location or location set of a botnet Keyword searched or domain name with the word “Bot” 2. Unknown Referral Traffic Referral traffic refers to the traffic that comes to the site by clicking on a link in another domain or platform. It is also used as a medium for bot traffic. These sources can be detected manually on Google Analytics. Some of the common signs of bot-generated referral traffic are: Sites with spammy-looking domains Referral sites with unusually high visits 3. Unusually Low Page-Time Unlike the human way of browsing, the bots are programmed in a way that they behave in the same pattern. When looking at the Google analytics data, check for sources that have a page visit time of less than a minute. Bots are programmed to just add a visit to the page which is usually 1 or 2 seconds maximum. It is obvious that a human will not come and stay on a page for less than 1 second, and hence you can detect the traffic generated by bots. 4. Strange Metrics The classic sign of bot activity on your site is if you see something at an extreme or unusually low. For instance, if you see bounce rates of sources at 0% or 100% then there is a high chance this visit is from a fraudulent source. Is detecting bot traffic on Google Analytics enough? Google Analytics allows you to exclude bot traffic to see a clear picture of your data without fraud traffic. With the help of Google Analytics, you can get a better insight into how much website traffic is genuine to make a better business decision. This can help you exclude the bot traffic showing on your analytics data, but the real impact of bot traffic will still exist. Thus, just the bot traffic detection on Google Analytics is not enough. To protect your websites and ad campaigns from the impact of bot traffic, you need an advanced ad traffic validation suite. This can prevent bots from draining your ad budget on invalid traffic and skewing your data. Advanced Problems Need Advanced Solutions The general bots are easy to detect by analyzing the unusual bot patterns. However, the sophisticated bots are programmed in a way that they can easily replicate human behavior. And thus, an advanced ad fraud detection tool becomes necessary to combat this problem. mFilterIt’s ad traffic validation suite detects bot traffic in real-time and eliminates them to prevent further wastage of ad spends. With the capabilities of AI, ML, and data science, the solution detects and analyses the bot patterns based on various parameters and blacklists them. Takeaways There is no one way to fight ad fraud and win against the fraudsters. With the help of analytics, you can take better business decisions by excluding the bot traffic sources from your data points. With the right mix of both analytics and ad fraud detection, you can combat ad fraud attacks and ensure that only real humans are viewing and clicking your ads and visiting your website.

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Price Not Visible on Keyword Search Results: How it Happens and What Can You Do About It?

Leave a Comment / Blog, Digital Shelf Analytics / Expert Opinion

Have you ever come across products without price tags on e-commerce platforms? Well, it happens a lot and causes a lot of distress. Price tags on online shopping stores hold the capacity to captivate the attention of millions of potential buyers and increase online sales/revenue. When the price of a product is not shown, the consumer might choose other options or platforms, as the buying intention remains consistent. Moreover, listings without prices may diminish the search rank on the keyword search results of an e-commerce platform. Most online shopping stores offer products in stock, with prices and titles to entice buyers. The collaborative effort of the brand and the e-commerce marketplace enables higher revenue for both. The price of a product is not shown if some other seller has won the buy box, the product is out-of-stock, or the seller is facing disputes in the e-commerce marketplace. It could also happen due to a technical issue or enlisting a wrong option/variant of a product listing. Neither of these scenarios is good for a brand. What’s more? Products without price tags that rank high on keyword search results are wasting your marketing efforts, as they are stealing the position of your product variants that have price tags. Sure, they are generating brand awareness but they are diminishing the impact of potential revenue or sales from an e-commerce platform. Moreover, products without price tags on keyword searches of an online shopping store give an edge to your competition, as they have price tags and become more enticing for a consumer before making a final buying decision. So, what can you do about it? 3 Ways to Avoid Invisibility of Price Tags on E-Commerce Platforms The global e-commerce retail sales figure is bound to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025. Imagine the loss your business can face by not paying attention to products without price tags on e-commerce platforms. How to resolve this problem? Here are three ways: – Manage Stock Availability Did you know that 39% of U.S. retailers are very concerned about stockouts during the holiday season? The impact of out-of-stock is directly linked to global supply chain disruptions. In the past few years, our clients have discovered that stockouts also happen during the rest of the year. One of our FMCG customers was facing 65% unavailability of products until it started reviewing and analyzing availability at pin code, SKU, platform, category, and other levels. Post-analysis, the brand took measures to resolve the problem by informing the respective Key Account Managers and Category Managers of their e-commerce marketplaces. Their actions resulted in the higher engagement of product listings with the target audience and conversions/revenue. The stock unavailability diminished to less than 30% in nearly three months after taking action. However, the availability of products also resulted in the visibility of the price tags. So, whenever consumers look for specific items under multiple categories or sub-categories of the e-commerce marketplace, they can compare the brand product price to the competitors before making a final purchasing decision. – Optimize the Product Pages Most people will ignore products without price tags on keyword search results. Therefore, you should also ensure that search results of the digital shelf always have variants. How can you manage this? Is it impossible? Well, No! You could probably check the keywords working for your product listings and rank new product variants at the top of the digital shelf results by using them. However, it will take time to rank and will depend on the product page optimization results too. Use the top-performing keywords in the product listings currently in stock across multiple geo-locations. Our solution, e-commerce analytics tool, mScanIt, monitors the Share-of-Shelf of your brand vis-a-vis the competition. You can check the average page position of your listings using a keyword sub-type under the SOS dashboard. By doing so, you can achieve your goal of boosting the digital shelf rank of your e-commerce product listings on brand, competition, and generic keyword search results. The solution also defines your product page scores. So, you can easily monitor the score of the competitors and check the product page content working for them. Doing so would help to build strategies to optimize the product pages further. – Win the Buy Box – Strategically The buy box is the column that consists of the add-to-cart and buy-action buttons. It has become popular among the e-commerce marketplace sellers, as they are assigned based on the marketplace algorithms. However, winning the buy box is also dependent on stock availability. We believe that brands that have associations with the best marketplace sellers have a higher tendency to win the buy box. Simultaneously, keeping the brand reputation intact through seller-wise analysis and reporting unauthorized third-party sellers can become a stepping stone. Moreover, brands can divert the buyer’s attention to their authorized sellers and increase their market share. Isn’t this mind-boggling? Well, it isn’t. There is a whole market of counterfeit sellers on e-commerce platforms. According to a report, 74.8% of people around the globe became victims of online shopping scams through e-commerce marketplaces. Brands lost revenue, but their biggest concern is damage to brand reputation. So, stopping unauthorized 3P sellers can help avoid such repercussions and increase the chance of winning the buy box. Bottom Line Products without price tags on e-commerce search results can damage brands in multiple ways. On the other hand, ensuring price tag visibility can increase visibility, brand awareness, product discoverability, and conversions/sales. The best method for ensuring this is by avoiding stockouts, diminishing counterfeit seller activities on online shopping platforms, optimizing the product pages, and strategically winning the buy box. Connect with us to learn how monitoring products through mScanIt can help to achieve these goals. Get in touch to learn more about keyword search results.

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