Guest comment: Click Fraud can sabotage trust in mobile advertising

Click fraud has blighted internet advertising for years- inflating the costs for advertisers with fraudulent clicks. Now the practice has become commonplace in mobile ads too. Shalom Berkovitz, CEO of DMG explores the world of mobile click fraud and how advertisers can fight it.


Click Fraud, or unwanted clicks that do not originate from target audiences is creating headaches for mobile advertisers. In addition to traditional causes of click fraud from online advertising, a Harris Interactive survey conducted last year reported that 47% of mobile application users clicked on mobile ads by mistake.
Click fraud is not new. In 2006, Google settled a $90 million lawsuit after advertisers argued that it had not given them adequate compensation for fraudulent online ad clicks.
However, as more and more digital advertising dollars are moving to mobile, click fraud is becoming a serious issue, as it was for online. Gartner predicted mobile advertising will grow to $20.6 billion in 2015, up from an estimated $3.3 billion in 2011.
In addition to the sheer growth in mobile advertising, click fraud has higher impact for mobile advertisers who are primarily paying for traffic per click. Moreover In many cases the success of a mobile advertising campaign is measured by the Click Through Rate (CTR).
Typical causes of click fraud can be competitors attempting to run up advertising costs, a clickbot or piece of software designed to drive up clicks, a person in a developing country paid to click., or from some honest technical mistakes made by developers. There are several mobile games on the market where every time a player starts a game it is counted accidentally as if there is a click on the advertisement.
Integrated reporting systems collect information from multiple platforms and traffic sources to gain visibility across media, markets, operating systems and devices. They continuously monitor campaigns, keeping a watchful eye out for any abnormalities while supporting a wide variety of indicating parameters including high ratio from impression to click , low ratio from click to conversion, and massive amounts of clicks generated in a short period of time from one IP address or location.
By detecting and providing detailed reports of suspicious patterns advertisers can be assured that they are getting exactly what they paying for and in addition have a true picture of their campaign performance for better planning and more effective advertising. For some advertisers the savings can amount to tens of thousands per month.
Online advertising is evolving, and with it the tools to nail down ad effectiveness. As advertisers feel more confident they are receiving the desired results, and anti-click fraud solutions eliminate false positives, mobile advertising will continue to become a larger and larger piece of the marketing mix.
By Shalom Berkovitz
CEO
DSNR Media Group
Shalom Berkovitz, CEO of DSNR Media Group (DMG), which this month launched anti click fraud solution for mobile advertising. Shalom has over 20 years of executive management experience, mainly in the Internet and e-Commerce sectors, with roles including CEO of d-group, a subsidiary of Golden Pages, Israel’s Yellow Pages. Shalom holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from Tel Aviv University.