mFilterIt
Contact Us
mfilterit

Programmatic

Programmatic Advertising

How Top Brands Are Winning with Programmatic Advertising

Blog, Programmatic /

In this competitive digital environment, brand messaging reaching the right audience at the right place has become imperative. To boost the brand’s success rate, programmatic advertising is the best way to ensure high accuracy and high turnover in depth. In 2023, programmatic advertisements accounted for 90% of the total ad spending. However, the big question is how brands and businesses are leveling it up to remain relevant in the market. Let’s discuss how programmatic advertising can be used the right way by implementing the right strategies.   Why Brands are Embracing Programmatic Advertising? Programmatic advertising has transformed the way brands interact with their target audiences by automating the buying and placement of ads with the help of powerful algorithms that provide precision, efficiency, and scalability.  to increase the success rate which is lacking in traditional advertising.   -Precise Targeting: Using precise targeting in programmatic ad marketers use data to identify target audiences. It allows brands to send modified messages based on demographics, activities, and even real-time intent.   -Real-Time Optimization: Programmatic campaigns help in delivering real-time analytics, allowing brands to monitor performance and adjust the campaign according to their need. This enables marketers to optimize ad creatives, placements, and budgets in real-time, resulting in better results.   -Scalability Across Platforms: Programmatic advertising connects people to a wide range of platforms, including social media and display networks, as well as connected TV and audio streaming services. This enables marketers to maintain the presence across several touchpoints without having any extra burden on managing individual channels separately.   -Cost Efficiency: Traditional processes of buying and placement of ads can be time-consuming as they require negotiations and manual adjustments. With programmatic systems marketers can process millions of transactions in milliseconds, enabling brands to swiftly launch and adjust campaigns to close potential opportunities. Challenges in Programmatic Advertising   Programmatic advertising is used in revolutionizing brand engagement with audiences, yet it brings its own set of challenges.   -Lack of Transparency: Programmatic advertising has enabled advertisers to reach large audiences, but it also poses significant gaps. Transparency of the ad campaigns is one of them. The advertisers are unaware of where their ads are showing. In some cases, this non-transparency can lead to ads appearing on low-quality, spammy websites that produce irrelevant traffic, hampering the brand reputation. The lack of transparency can impact on budget allocation because advertisers cannot judge campaign performance and ad placement.  -Viewability Issues: IAB has defined ad viewability as a standard metric to measure viewable impressions. According to it, an ad is considered viewable if the ad appears at least 50% on screen for more than one second. However, this parameter is not enough to ensure the ads are viewed by the right audience or in most cases even a human. Fraudsters deploy bot traffic to see the ads and even fraudulent publishers use tactics like ad stacking to generate impressions. The advertisers are under the impression that their ads are seen by the right audience, but in reality, they are not.   -Advertising Fraud & Bot Traffic: Ad fraud is one of the rising issues in programmatic advertising, with 37% of ad buyers concerned about abusive suppliers, bots, and invalid traffic. Over time, the fraudulent activities have become sophisticated and difficult to detect. KPIs like impressions and clicks can be easily met by fraudsters, resulting in skewed data and loss of budget  -Impact on Brand Safety: Apart from ad fraud, one of the other challenges that arise with non-transparency is placement of ads beside safe content. In many cases, the brand’s ads appear beside illicit or unsafe content which further impacts the brand’s reputation. Brands need to keep a check on their ad placements in addition to traffic validation.   Winning Strategies by Top Brands   Here are some strategies brands can implement to improve their programmatic campaign performance effectively.   -Ask for Transparency: Transparency should be the cornerstone for advertisers to ensure their optimization strategies are backed by clean data. By deploying an advanced ad fraud detection tool, advertisers can ensure they are getting genuine traffic on their ad campaigns. The right tool will help them with source-level transparency, helping them to understand where the traffic is coming from and take proactive action.   -Go beyond viewability metrics: While viewability is an important metric, it is important for advertisers to opt for a holistic approach. Advertisers should not just focus on “if the ad is visible or not” but also “who is seeing and interacting with the ad”. Using an ad fraud verification tool, advertisers can validate their ad traffic and also ensure quality traffic is engaging with the ads.   -Tackle Ad Fraud: Ad fraud remains a persisting challenge in the digital ecosystem and advertisers need the right guards to protect their ad spending. By deploying a real-time fraud detection solution, advertisers can identify evolving fraud techniques and implement preventative measures without major damage. By regularly auditing the data of their ad campaigns, advertisers can ensure where to invest more thereby improving the ROI and ensuring that their ads reach a genuine audience. -Prioritizing Brand Safety: For advertisers, protecting the brand image is the utmost priority. This includes ensuring that the ads are placed in an appropriate and brand-friendly environment. By continuously monitoring the ad placements using advanced brand monitoring tools, the advertisers can avoid associations with inappropriate and harmful content. A proactive approach to validate the ad placements can help the advertisers establish strict guidelines for partners and platforms where their ads are appearing. By prioritizing brand safety, brands maintain consumer trust, reinforce positive perceptions, and protect long-term relationships with their audiences.   A Real Case: How a global brand tackled low engagement on programmatic campaigns  A global brand in the energy sector faced low conversion rates and limited engagement despite significant investment in audio and display campaigns on platforms like DCM and DV360. The brand realized its ad delivery process was inefficient, leading to wasted resources and poor returns. They partnered with mFilterIt and deployed its

How Top Brands Are Winning with Programmatic Advertising Read More »

Programmatic Advertising

Ai in Programmatic Advertising Fraud Detection to Deliver Performance and Sustainability

Blog, Programmatic /

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

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

image

Ad Fraud Prevention across Programmatic advertising landscape in the USA

USA, Blog, Programmatic /

Programmatic has become the powerhouse behind ad placements in the U.S. However, alongside its growth, ad fraud has also skyrocketed, posing a significant challenge for brands trying to make the most of their digital ad spending. Ad fraud costs U.S. advertisers billions each year, and the automated process makes it increasingly difficult to detect and prevent.   According to mFilterIt reports, bot traffic remains one of the biggest culprits, making up an estimated 20-25% of programmatic ad impressions. Meanwhile, the ANA report says low-quality “made-for-advertising” (MFA) sites account for roughly 10-15% of programmatic spending, delivering little value as they exist solely to serve ads on poorly engaging or irrelevant content. Even the burgeoning Connected TV (CTV) sector isn’t immune, with up to 17% of CTV programmatic impressions deemed fraudulent. Ad fraud solution with integrated brand safety is the key to optimizing programmatic ad campaigns.  Are you aware of fraudulent or invalid traffic in your programmatic ad campaigns? The need for full-funnel protection with AI, ML-driven solutions, and real-time analysis, has never been greater.  Why is programmatic a black box?  Programmatic advertising is often described as a “black box” due to the complex, largely automated processes that operate behind the scenes, making it challenging for advertisers to see where their ads end up, how budgets are spent, and the actual impact of their campaigns.  Massive Volume Makes It Hard to Track: Massive volume of ad impressions served daily, programmatic operates on an enormous scale, making it difficult to monitor each ad placement. Ads are distributed across thousands of websites, apps, and devices, creating a web of tough placements to trace without advanced tools.   Viewability metrics Alone aren’t Enough. They don’t tell the full story. Many advertisers focus on viewability, but an ad might be “viewable” but still appear in an irrelevant or low-quality context, or worse, on a fraudulent site. Viewability is just the tip of the iceberg in determining if an ad placement is valuable.  CPM is not the true reflection of ad performance: A go-to metric in programmatic, Cost-per-thousand (CPM) doesn’t necessarily reflect ad performance. As they do not show the genuine engagement generated or conversions. Moving beyond CPM for ad performance measurement and focusing on true performance metrics gives a clearer picture of campaign effectiveness. Transaction-wise analysis is a major problem: Transaction-wise analysis can reveal which sources drive real value versus those that don’t. Programmatic transactions happen in milliseconds, and each one is an opportunity to optimize or lose value. Advertisers may be paying for impressions that don’t deliver ROI, amplifying the “black box” problem.  Need for AI & ML Tools for Better Transparency: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools can help analyze data at scale and are essential for breaking open the black box. Track ad placements in real time and identify patterns of low-quality or fraudulent traffic. Dig deeper into their programmatic campaigns, ensuring ads appear in relevant, brand-safe environments and that budgets are spent effectively.  Here are some additional reasons to consider programmatic advertising “Black box”  Fraudulent Traffic and Ad Waste: Click fraud, bot traffic, and ad stacking are prevalent in programmatic advertising. Without adequate validation, advertisers might pay for impressions that never reach a genuine audience.  Limited Performance Metrics: Programmatic platforms may restrict access to granular performance metrics, offering only top-level KPIs. This limits advertisers’ ability to make informed decisions and optimize campaigns effectively.  Complex Supply Chain: Programmatic advertising involves multiple intermediaries, including supply-side platforms (SSPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), ad exchanges, and data management platforms (DMPs). Each layer takes a portion of the advertising budget, but transparency on costs and value added by each is often missing.  Lack of Transparent Data: Advertisers frequently lack access to the complete data trail across the ad supply chain. This makes it hard to track where ads are being served, who is viewing them, and whether they are reaching the intended audience.  Data Discrepancies Across Platforms: Advertisers often face data inconsistencies between platforms (e.g., discrepancies between ad platforms and analytics tools). These inconsistencies make it challenging to evaluate ROI accurately.    High Reliance on Algorithms: Programmatic platforms rely heavily on machine learning algorithms for targeting and bidding. These algorithms operate as “black boxes,” with little transparency into how they make decisions or optimize for specific goals.  Brand Safety and Ad Placement Risks: Without control over ad placements, brands risk their ads appearing alongside inappropriate or harmful content, which can damage brand reputation. Solutions to ensure brand safety often come with additional costs.  Lack of Accountability: With limited insight into who is responsible for performance issues within the ecosystem, advertisers struggle to hold intermediaries accountable for missed KPIs or wasted ad spending.  A clearer view into the “black box” of programmatic advertising with mFIlterIt enables more transparent, performance-driven campaigns that truly optimize ad spending.  The Issue in Programmatic Advertising   Programmatic advertising faces a range of issues that can dilute campaign effectiveness and drain ad budgets. That includes:   Fraudulent Impressions: Bots or non-human traffic generate false ad views leading to fraudulent interactions, inflate metrics without engaging real customers, waste Ad spending and skew data analytics. Advanced fraud detection tools such as mFilterIt can effectively distinguish between legitimate users and malicious bot traffic.  Made-for-Advertising (MFA) Sites: MFA sites are created solely to host ads, with minimal, often low-quality content. These sites prioritize ad placement over user experience, resulting in low engagement and poor ad performance. Identifying and avoiding MFA sites helps advertisers focus on genuine, content-rich environments where ads are more likely to reach and engage real users.  Identify and weed out traffic from Invalid Geographies: Programmatic campaigns sometimes face issues with ads being served in locations outside the target audience’s region. Invalid geographies, where ads might not be relevant, can dilute the effectiveness of a campaign and waste budget on non-converting audiences. Geotargeting and refined audience filters can help ensure ads reach relevant locations.  Frequency Capping: Without effective frequency capping, programmatic ads may be shown to the same user excessively, leading to ad fatigue and negative brand perception.

Ad Fraud Prevention across Programmatic advertising landscape in the USA Read More »

Ad Fraud

Ad Fraud in Programmatic Ads: Why Impression-Level Protection Matters

Blog, Programmatic /

Performance Programmatic Platforms follow the same rules as traditional programmatic platforms, but the focus on performance campaigns is to optimize ad placements through real-time bidding and enable data-driven decision-making. These platforms buy and place ads for advertisers with targeting functionalities, dynamic creative optimization, and performance analysis. As they market themselves, the entire process is ML and algorithm-driven. However, there is a prevailing myth that these platforms are fraud-free. Even MMPs are failing to do anything to curb these frauds because they have no protection at the impression level and minimum protection at clicks. Let’s delve deeper to burst the myth and highlight what advertisers need to do to optimize campaigns on performance programmatic platforms. The Myth of Fraud-Free Performance Programmatic Platforms With the sophisticated technology behind performance programmatic advertising, these platforms are propagated to be fraud-free. This misconception arises from the belief that advanced algorithms and data-driven strategies can fully protect against fraudulent activities. However, fraudulent activities such as click fraud, impression fraud, and fake installs continue to plague the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Fraudsters constantly evolve their tactics to exploit system vulnerabilities. Many programmatic platforms claim to have robust ad fraud detection solution mechanisms, but these measures often fall short in practice. That’s where a third-party independent validator is needed. The sheer volume of transactions and the complexity create numerous opportunities for invalid traffic to slip through the cracks. Type of Fraud on Performance Programmatic Platforms 1. Impression Fraud: Impression injection artificially inflates the number of ad impressions, executed by generating fake impressions in the background, later if the user downloads and installs an application organically or inorganically, the attribution gets stolen. This technique manipulates the ad delivery system to make it appear as though ads are being viewed more frequently than they are. 2. Click Fraud: Fraudsters generate fake ad requests that make it appear as though legitimate users are viewing ads. These can be triggered by bots or automated scripts. 3. Imperceptible Window: Ads may be loaded in ways that are invisible to the user, such as in a background process or in a 1×1 pixel iframe, ensuring they are not seen by actual humans. 4. Ad Stacking: Sometimes multiple ads are stacked on top of each other, but only one is visible. Each ad in the stack registers an impression, leading to inflated impression counts. 5. Fraudsters also exploit software development kits (SDKs) within legitimate apps to load ads in the background without the user’s knowledge. 6. Fake Devices: non-genuine or simulated devices to generate fraudulent ad activity or BOT-based impressions that are totally junk. Fraudsters use device emulators or simulators to mimic the behavior of multiple real devices. This allows them to generate fake traffic at a scale. 7. Device Farms: collections of physical devices, often managed by automated systems, that repeatedly engage with ads to create the illusion of genuine user activity. Fraudsters also manipulate device identifiers, such as Android Device IDs, to create fake device profiles. 8. IP Fraud: Fraudsters also use Invalid IP (use of VPNs) and get impressions from regions not targeted which results in high impressions but low ROI. Challenges in Optimizing Ad Campaigns 1. Myth of No Ad Fraud: The first thing is busting the bubble and countering the myth that there is no fraud on impressions, programmatic-based partners, or programmatic performance. Once advertisers accept the fact then proactive measures for full-funnel protection can be put in place to tackle ad fraud at every level and elevate campaign performance. 2. Brand Safety Issues: Next is combating brand safety issues with safe and relevant placement, protecting brand reputation. 3. Frequency Cap Violations: The most common and often neglected issue is FCAP violations along with bots spamming impressions for payouts. Brands need to be vigilant and identify F-cap violations to make sure their ad reaches the broader and relevant audience and is not seen by similar sets multiple times to generate impressions leading to ad fatigue, not conversions. 4. Down-the-funnel KPIs are ignored: Aggregators also mix traffic and sell it by the name of premium inventory. In case of fraud, the clean publisher gets a bad reputation. Since the organic is stolen, down the funnel, is going to be met. Limitations of Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) MMPs provide insights into user behavior, campaign effectiveness, and ROI. However, their ability to curb fraud is limited. 1. MMPs typically focus on tracking clicks and conversions but have minimal protection against impression fraud. 2. Impression fraud involves generating fake ad impressions to inflate metrics, which can mislead advertisers about the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns. While MMPs do have mechanisms to identify and filter out invalid clicks, these protections are often not comprehensive enough to detect all fraudulent clicks. 3. Another key issue with MMPs is attribution challenges as fraudsters often use tactics like click injection and click spamming to manipulate attribution models. MMPs, despite their advanced analytics, can struggle to differentiate between legitimate user actions and fraudulent activities, leading to incorrect attribution and wasted ad spending. Let’s get a better understanding of the challenges and how mFilterIt helped resolve them Case 1: How A Popular Gaming Brand Optimizes Performance in USA – App Campaign For instance, Let’s take the case of a trusted and most popular gaming platform in the US. The app offers a variety of games across a range of categories, such as card games, casual games, etc. Fraud at Impression Level: On Android, the fraud at the impression level was as high as 33% among over 56 million impressions generated, while on the iOS platform, 14% fraudulent impressions were detected among 4.8 million impressions. The major chunk of fraudulent impression was due to impression Injection, and the rest came from Invalid IP addresses, or sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT). Fraud At Click Level: Among million and above clicks 11% were fraudulent on the Android platform. 6.13% of clicks were generated via click Injection and 3.69% came from fake devices while on the iOS platform, among 98, 800 plus clicks, 6%

Ad Fraud in Programmatic Ads: Why Impression-Level Protection Matters Read More »

programmatic advertising

Combatting Programmatic Ad Fraud: Traffic Validation with Integrated Brand Safety

Leave a Comment / Blog, Programmatic /

Programmatic advertising offers unparalleled efficiency and reach. However, programmatic ad fraud is a growing problem that has dented the efficiency and return on investment (ROI). It not only leads to a massive loss in advertising Ad spend but also causes reputational damage. Programmatic ad fraud mainly includes generating fake clicks and impressions using bots and automated systems. Inflated ad spending, depleted ROI, and eroded trust caused by programmatic fraud are significant consequences. Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning-driven tech with monitoring, analysis, and real-time actionable insights is needed to optimize programmatic ad campaigns. Optimizing Programmatic ads – Ad Traffic Validation with integrated Brand safety Detection of Bot traffic is the major challenge in programmatic advertising. Automated blocking of ads such as invalid traffic in all branding campaigns across all programmatic platforms is critical for the success of the ad campaign. mFiliter enables advertisers to validate branding campaign traffic with integrated brand safety. It provides media verification across the programmatic ecosystem or any other campaigns that have CPM payouts. The integrated brand safety helps identify safe, unsafe, or irrelevant ad placement. A step that empowers advertisers beyond ad traffic validation. Optimizing Programmatic ad campaigns requires the following: Weeding out General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) Identify ad placements on Made-for-Ad Sites (MFA) Check for Frequency Cap Violations on OTT or video streaming media platforms. Ad Placements Monitoring as per the GARM safety standards and Brand Guidelines Advanced AI and ML tech capabilities and behavior analytics are used to protect programmatic advertising from ad fraud and ensure brand safety. It must cover all advertising programmatic advertising channels such as DV360, a demand-side platform (DSP) that enables the purchase of a diverse spectrum of online media programmatically, CTV streaming services, and platforms like Roku, OTT Platforms, or any other platforms that support programmatic ads. How does ad fraud affect programmatic advertising? Automated, data-driven buying and selling of digital ad inventory occurs at programmatic ad channels. Leveraging AI-ML-driven tech can help optimize ad placement and reach the desired targeted audience more efficiently. Programmatic ad campaigns can have fraud rates as high as 15-20% in the worst cases. Ad fraud prevention in programming is required to cut down wastage of ad spend and get better returns on campaign investments. In addition to financial losses, ad fraud can negatively impact brands in several other ways including: Damage Brand Reputation When ads appear on MFA sites, low-quality or inappropriate sites can harm the brand reputation, as consumers may associate the brand with these negative contexts, leading to trust erosion. Skew campaign metrics and performance Ad fraud skews analytics and data, leading to misleading campaign performance metrics. This results in ineffective marketing strategies, as decisions are based on inaccurate data. Lose customer trust Consumers’ trust in a brand gets reduced if they perceive its ads as pervasive or intrusive in case of Frequency capping violations or programmatic ads appearing in unsuitable online environments. Decreased campaign ROI The return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns diminishes significantly due to fraudulent activities, as a portion of the ad spend is diverted to non-genuine interactions Emerging tech to combat programmatic ad fraud Awareness is the first step! Move beyond the myths such as no Fraud on Walled Gardens, no fraud on performance-driven campaigns or publisher reports give a clear picture of where the brand has spent its marketing budgets or brand safety has nothing to do with ROI and is an unnecessary cost. In the fight against programmatic ad fraud, the journey goes well beyond simply knowing about it. The estimated average ad fraud is around 15% Fraud on OTT, 20% Fraud on CTV, and 18% Fraud on YouTube. Surprising numbers? Not really. Ignorance is not bliss in this case, Advertisers need advanced tech to combat programmatic ad fraud in real-time, ensure the safety of ad place, and safeguard brand repute. Contrary to what many believe, advertisers are not helpless against such instances of fraud and it is up to the advertisers to protect their interests. The simplest, most surefire way to protect your interests is to use ad fraud detection tools. Such a tool uses AI and ML algorithms to continually and intelligently monitor the user activity on your ad campaigns. Since the algorithms work round the clock and without the influence of human bias, you can rest assured that your campaigns are protected the way they should be. Final Thought – Optimize the efficiency of Programmatic ad campaigns Programmatic advertising is a superb way to reach your customers. The insights advertisers can draw from their programmatic campaigns can help them consistently improve the returns they make on their programmatic ad spend. With programmatic ad traffic validation, brands require full funnel coverage across various digital channels along with enhanced ad visibility pre-bid & post-bid for impressions on programmatic, OTTs, and CTV platforms. However, ad fraud stands in the way of advertisers looking to maximize their investment in programmatic advertising. This is where programmatic ad fraud protection can come in handy, helping advertisers protect their campaigns and maximize their gains. Get in touch to learn more about the programmatic ad fraud.

Combatting Programmatic Ad Fraud: Traffic Validation with Integrated Brand Safety Read More »

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.

Challenges In Programmatic Advertising: Know How You Can Combat Them Read More »

programmatic-advertising

Ad Fraud Detection: Impact of Fraud in Programmatic Advertising

Leave a Comment / Blog, Programmatic /

Programmatic advertisements are goldmines for cybercriminal syndicates. Statista report estimated that programmatic ad spending would exceed $147 billion in 2020. It also stated that it accounted for 69.2% of the worldwide display ad spend in 2019. Moreover, the estimated cost per lead through programmatic display ads is nearly $40. Our research reveals that $1 out of $4 of advertising spends goes to fraudsters. Cybercriminals create hoax websites, spoof domains, manipulate IPs & geolocations, etc., to obtain financial gain and drain advertising budgets. Such activities also hamper brand safety drastically. Programmatic ad frauds commonly occur through bot impressions, wherein fraudsters use bots, an invalid traffic source for displaying the desired results. Moreover, fraudulent clicks account for more than 60% of the installs and must be rejected. Instead, the ad network and advertisers account for it as postbacks. Post-bid programmatic ad solutions work on detecting and eliminating bad bots and invalid traffic after receiving the first campaign results. Unfortunately, advertisers drain their advertising spending for their first campaign through this method. Moreover, new bots and IVTs may still hamper the upcoming campaigns. On the other hand, pre-bid programmatic ads require placing bids in 200 milliseconds, and the highest bid wins the placements. Studies suggest that bid requests can implode up to 200,000 per second. You might engage in programmatic direct to receive the desired ad results and placements. However, publishers often charge higher than bid costs for ad placements because they provide premium traffic. So, it depletes the programmatic ad budget faster than expected and may not always prove as a useful solution. Ad fraud in programmatic ad leads to grave implications while advertisers are busy buying or bidding on ad placements. Programmatic Ad Frauds: Grave Implications ● Screws Analytics and Ad Spends Cybercriminals use malware, bots, and other methods to mimic the behavior of humans on ads. The two most common techniques used by them are CPM and CPC frauds. CPM fraud involves boosting false impressions for enhancing advertisement costs. Fraudsters use bots to implode impressions (that lie top of the funnel). Ad slots refresh with recurring webpage reloads. Alternatively, they use data centers for targeting unseen iframes with stuffed ads. Cybercriminals even conduct geolocation scams by disguising data center traffic using residential proxies. Another common practice by fraudsters is device fraud. They impersonate iOS devices for showcasing premium lead inventory to advertisers. On the other hand, CPC fraud involves delivering false clicks on click-based ads. Click spamming and click injection are the common methods fraudsters use for CPC campaigns. The high-performance CTR is a result of malware. Differentiating fraudulent and real clicks becomes challenging because the devices used for delivering them are real. The result is screwed analytics and advertising spending. ● Retargets Bots (Through Ads) Most brands detect general invalid traffic (GIVT) on campaigns; however, they may still suffer from the impact of SIVT. Bots mimic the human-like behavior on websites by browsing, adding products to the cart, and exiting the website. Advertisers consider such bots in their premium lead inventories and add them into the retargeting campaigns through cookie-generated or list-based data. The bots click or view display/video ads until the advertiser finishes their placement inventory. By doing so, fraudsters sell bots as premium inventory to the advertiser for financial gain. Studies have shown that nearly 25% of online traffic is human only. So, most visitors to websites are potentially bots. Therefore, brands currently waste advertising spending by retargeting bots through programmatic ads. Ad fraud on programmatic ads cultivated for retargeting also raises the cost of programmatic direct and pre/post-bid placements charges. Moreover, retargeting campaigns account for 10 to 45% of the digital advertising budget for most brands. Therefore, eliminating programmatic ad fraud for retargeting can potentially save millions of dollars. ● Jeopardizes DSP Inventory The rise in programmatic ads has increased the number of fraudulent publishers. Moreover, Marketer predicted that 83% of the displays ads would be programmatic in 2017. Bad and incompatible inventories become a part of the Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). Businesses are still trying to reach the relevant audiences, even with compromised data. Advertisers use DSP data for programmatic campaigns, and ad frauds account for a major portion of them. In 2017, Chase diminished its programmatic reach from 400,000 to 5,000 websites (99%) to understand business outcomes. The brand experienced no change in results. However, we can identify that the invalid domains resulted from fraudulent activities. In 2016, P&G diminished ad spending by $200 million and had no sales implications. The action was based on brand safety, ad fraud, and digital ad clutter concerns by P&G’s Chief Brand Officer – Marc Pritchard. He realized that similar audiences received the brand ads multiple times and attention on Facebook ads was almost negligible (1.7 seconds). The brand optimized brand safety concerns raised by placements on objectionable content on YouTube. Ad fraud elimination helped the brand to obtain the correct measurement of ad placements. So, advertisers can create premium inventories and optimize their DSP data by detecting and eliminating ad fraud through SIVT and GIVT. Takeaway Ad fraud is plaguing the pre- and post-bid programmatic campaigns. Does this mean that advertisers should stop doing programmatic ads? Definitely not! The fight against GIVT is already ongoing by Google. However, brands need to identify and eliminate sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) to avoid depletion of the ad spending and improve their campaign analytics. Our programmatic ad fraud prevention tool mFilterIt, Valid8 effectively prevents fraud across the funnel and programmatic platforms include pre-bid and post-bid validation making your advertising effort more productive and boost ROI on programmatic advertising campaigns. This builds trust and transparency, and efficient ad fraud detection provides optimal outputs is a must. It eases navigate through the entire funnel beginning from the impressions and ending with the conversions. It can also drastically affect DSP inventories and retargeting campaigns to enhance performance.  

Ad Fraud Detection: Impact of Fraud in Programmatic Advertising Read More »

Scroll to Top