You can spend a lot of time reading our industry’s buzz about ad fraud. When you do, you’ll find that two things are undeniable:
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Ad fraud is everywhere. A recent study has found that 22% of mobile ad impressions are at risk of being fraudulent. That number shoots up to 33% when you evaluate just programmatic ads. In the US, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) uncovered bots behind 52% of display impressions when traffic was sourced by third parties.
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Ad fraud happens when marketers don’t know who they’re targeting. In order to drive big campaign numbers, marketers often enlist the help of third parties to publish their ads across the far reaches of the web. But by trusting in third parties who don’t use quality, people-centric data, or who model their audiences rather than use transaction-based data, marketers don’t have insight into how impressions are served and measured. This lack of transparency and quality data allows ad fraud to thrive.
And it ends up costing marketers big time. A further study by the ANA and White Ops, an ad fraud detection firm, estimates that marketers in the US alone will lose more than $7 billion globally to fraud this year.
Another statement that our industry treats as a truism: “Ad fraud is inevitable.” But that doesn’t have to be the case. With a partner like Conversant that offers more transparency into where traffic comes from—one that pulls in historical and real-time transactional data, CRM data, device IDs, cookies and more anonymised IDs of millions of consumers—bots can be beaten. When marketers are given a solid base of humans to serve ads to, they can feel confident that they’re avoiding bots, saving money and getting real results for their ad spend.
Ad fraud is just one of three issues that must be solved to ensure great ad quality. To find out more about our holistic solution to solving all of them, download our ad quality guide.