It’s well known that the internet is plagued with frauds, viruses, malware and so on; the user is not the only one affected by it, virtual traps are now affecting advertising and they are growing rapidly and uncontrollably. Just in 2017, ad fraud cost 6,500 million dollars, according to the Association of National Advertisers, while Google reported the removal of 3.1 billion ads the same year due to fraud.
How does it work?
At its center, it’s about stealing visits and clicks to digital ad campaigns using bots and fake websites to generate data as if they were human beings. The four most popular ways are: pixel stuffing, which is when you insert an ad of 1×1 pixel over another ad resulting on an invisible ad; ad stacking is when you overlay many ads on one spot, only the top one is visible but they all get impressions; misidentification is used to disguise low quality sites as high quality and finally; ad injections, this means that someone just inserts their ads by force on a site without the proper permits to do so.
One of the biggest problems is that the thieves range from one person that wants to make a quick buck, to giant organizations with thousands of bots working at the same time.
How can we fight it?
The first line of defense against fraud are the good ad practices, things like transparency, constant check ups, identifying ad metrics the site feeds us. For example, if we have exceedingly good KPIs, we can suspect fraud at first, it might not be the case but it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Alos, the Interactive Advertising Bureau launched a pair of tools that will prove to be of much help: ads.txt and ads.cert, the first one is basically a directory that is saved within a website where we can find the names of advertisers allowed to publish ads on the page; the second one is a little bit more complex, it certifies each of the advertisers that “touch” an ad from step 1 all the way until it’s published on site, verifying that the whole process maintained the highest standards.
The fight doesn’t end there, IAB is constantly trying to teach both advertisers and publishers to maintain good practices that might prevent fraud, but they can’t possibly do it alone, it’s our responsibility to help each other to understand how to fight better all these bots and frauds through transparency with our clients, detailed revisions of our KPIs and making good use of the tools others create to ensure the protection of our ROI and revenue for bot users and advertisers.
Fuentes
www.iabtechlab.com
www.adweek.com