What Is Ad Fraud?

Online advertising campaigns aim to display details of a product to the person who is most likely to want it. In return, the advertiser’s revenue increases and the publisher is rewarded with an advertising fee.

Ad fraud is the falsification of the number of times a digital advertisement is clicked on or displayed. This is a particularly vital topic for marketers to understand. Fraudulent activity can make a significant dent in marketing budgets and skew performance results to the detriment of future strategies.

Ad fraud is typically carried out by competitors or fraudulent publishers who utilise automated bot traffic to repeatedly click on ads. In this instance, money is paid by the advertiser to the publisher and the advertising platform, with the potential to defraud a business of huge sums of money.

How Does Ad Fraud Work?

Many websites are funded by the sale of advertising and many other companies invest large amounts of money in advertising campaigns hoping to increase revenue in response.

The system relies significantly, on automated exchanges that will match adverts with potential customers. Ad fraud takes advantage of these automated processes to masquerade as real users and take income for displaying adverts to non-existent users. The fraudulent activity affects both advertisers and publishers.

Advertisers are left paying for adverts that are displayed to non-existent users and publishers suffer increased chargebacks, as advertisers start to identify the number of adverts they suspect have been displayed to invalid traffic (known as IVT). Ad exchanges will detect levels of IVT and when they are too high, can block sites from accessing the exchange.

How to Detect Ad Fraud

At Netacea, we work with publishing sites to identify IVT and give site owners a choice regarding how they handle the fraudulent traffic. This could be by blocking a user from accessing the site, or by returning content but not adding ads to the page. Either way, the result is a drop in IVT.

If you suspect ad fraud is being carried out on, there are several identifying factors to be aware of:

• Repeated visits from the same user agent and spikes in traffic
• Unusually low conversion rates during traffic spikes
• Abnormal peaks in the number of clicks or impressions
• A lack of conversions vs. other platforms

To reliably identify IVT, we analyse the source and reputation of the origin of all traffic to spot bad actors.

Preventing Ad Fraud

You can aim to prevent ad fraud by working with a technology provider that can accurately detect automated bot traffic and identify fraudulent behaviour, defining actions to be taken in the event of a fraud attack.

However, working with a vendor that gives you an accurate view of all traffic to your web-facing infrastructure will give you with a comprehensive understanding of what ordinary vs. anomalous traffic behaviour looks like, enabling the effective and efficient blocking of malicious activity.

Our Intent Analytics engine, analyses the patterns and behaviours of the traffic, determining how this aligns with that of legitimate users. The engine uses advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect non-human visitors, including botnets.

Request a personalised demo to discover more about our pioneering approach to bot management.