Emma Newman, VP, UK, PubMatic, outlines the most effective tactics media sellers and media buyers should employ today to fight not only basic fraudulent activity but the ever-evolving, more complex forms of fraud that bad actors are constantly introducing to the online advertising ecosystem.
In 2017 Procter & Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer, Marc Pritchard, sounded a call for industry action when he cautioned, “[With] fraud as high as 20%, who knows if [consumers are] even seeing our ads.” This year, Unilever’s Keith Weed took up the baton, arguing that diminishing trust in digital media generally “threatens to undermine the relationship between consumers and brands.” Among the key factors driving these calls for action is the rising impact of ad fraud – which Juniper Research predicts will cost advertisers an astounding $19 billion in 2018.
Although it might seem that publishers and advertisers are fighting a losing battle against fraud, with the right approach fraud can be minimized. Here are some key tips for developing a cleaner advertising environment.
- Use ad verification providers
There are a number of ad verification companies, including Integral Ad Science and WhiteOps, that provide protection against both general ad fraud (such as activities that are too fast or repetitive compared to a legitimate user) and sophisticated ad fraud (such as falsely represented sites designed to deceive viewers into thinking they are on another site). In addition, Moat provides a complimentary and widely-used solution that empowers its clients with real-time analytics about their ad campaigns and traffic.
While much of the data surrounding ad verification is typically a black box, you can rest more easily knowing that most common forms of general and sophisticated fraud are being filtered out in real time. In a Pixalate case study, Pocketmath notably managed to block 3 billion questionable impressions within the first 90 days of implementing the service. In another case study conducted by WhiteOps, a leading consumer packaged goods brand managed to reduce ad fraud from 11% of all traffic to less than 1.5% consistently.
If you have the resources, I suggest working with multiple ad verification vendors to ensure minimal gaps in fraud detection. That will give you the ability to consistently evaluate, compare and validate their data against each other.
- Employ ads.txt
The IAB’s ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers) Initiative helps ad buyers avoid spoof inventory while maximizing revenue and CPMs for legitimate publishers by attracting advertisers to move spend from the open market to programmatic direct deals. Ads.txt was officially launched in 2017 and is currently in a rapid adoption phase. As of February 2018, Pixalate estimated 51% of its 5,000 websites worldwide have already implemented ads.txt.
Ads.txt has benefits for all players within the ecosystem:
- For publishers, it helps to prevent inventory from being fraudulently sold to an unrelated third party that may be domain spoofing. It does this by allowing buyers to identify who is authorised by the media owner to sell the digital inventory
- For ad tech platforms, it helps to verify that impressions being bought and sold on the platform are authorised by the publisher
- For ad buyers, it helps to verify the validity of ad inventory to ensure ads are being served on legitimate publisher inventory rather than a spoofed domain
- Use a whitelist and blacklist
A common practice is the use of domain whitelists and blacklists. Whitelists are lists of domains that you want to explicitly target; they ensure that ads don’t get served elsewhere, which tends to happen with bundled site buys. Whitelisting is not perfect, but it’s a best practice when a media buyer is targeting specific publishers. It’s usually a core function within most demand-side platforms (DSPs), so consider it a free tool at your disposal.
Blacklists are lists of domains that media buyers want to explicitly block. Blacklisting is one of the most effective strategies to prevent fraud, and an actively managed blacklist is a good way to block low-quality sites from campaigns. Furthermore, keeping a universal blacklist updated is an important practice. This should be approached in 3 ways:
- Firstly, blacklist sites that partners flag as high fraud
- Secondly, pull a top-level domain list and comb through – a lot of time, sites with abnormally high click through rates (CTRs) are full of bots
- Finally, it’s good to go through the top-level domain list manually from time to time and look at the sites. Consider whether each site contains content that is brand safe. Are they legitimate sites? I would recommend conducting all of these tactics as often as possible, at the bare minimum 2-3 times per month
The downside to managing whitelists and blacklists is that it’s a reactive and manual process. It’s also possible for bad actors to spoof impressions to evade such tactics. Regardless, they provide a competitive advantage against other less-diligent advertisers.
- Consider private marketplaces
Private Marketplaces (PMPs) take place at a higher ad-serving priority than the open public marketplace. You’ll sometimes hear PMPs referred to as “Deal ID,” which is the technical term for the mechanism that powers them. Most fraudulent publishers don’t have private marketplaces; this makes PMPs generally a safer option for brands.
- Demand transparency from ad tech providers
Don’t simply trust vendors that offer new “ad tech” or say that they are high quality. Demand transparency. Ask to understand how the technology works, not just what it promises to deliver. Ad fraud isn’t hard to avoid if you do the right things with the right partners.
As it impacts revenue and brand reputation, fraud is everyone’s responsibility – advertisers, agencies, intermediaries and publishers. All players in the supply chain need to put the right measures in place to ensure fraud is minimized and everyone needs to encourage, or even force, partners to do the same.
Advertisers need to play their part. A survey of US advertisers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps for the Bot Baseline Report found that only 40% of advertisers had an anti-fraud policy in place, 55% used an anti-fraud detection vendor and 43% used a fraud prevention vendor.
Buying ads – particularly programmatically – is complex and involves a host of intermediaries, where advertisers have little visibility of where their ads run, or which ad networks are fulfilling the placement. This makes it essential everyone plays their part to minimize fraud and maximize transparency.
By Emma Newman
VP UK