Can You Avoid Digital Ad Fraud?

What is Ad Fraud? A quick search of Wikipedia gives us the following:

“Ad fraud (also referred to as Invalid Traffic) is concerned with theory and practice of fraudulently representing online advertisement impressions, clicks, conversion or data events in order to generate revenue.”

The nasty side of ad fraud is not just the outright theft of an advertiser’s money, it is also the loss of communication and consumer response that would otherwise be generated by the investment. A recent article in MediaPost reported that the average occurrence of ad fraud heated up between October and November of 2018.

“Fraudlogix, an ad-verification company,  analyzed three months of global programmatic ad traffic and found that the average percentage of fraudulent traffic jumped from 11.6% in October to 14.2% in November. The data includes all device types. Invalid or fraudulent traffic is generated by bots, hijacked devices, or malware. The data comes from monitoring traffic from more than 640 million unique users, 1.2 billion unique devices, and 12 million URLs monthly.”

Likewise they report that ad verification companies estimate that 48% of all internet traffic comes from bots. With that much activity, it’s a wonder that ad fraud occurrence isn’t higher. Still, that means advertisers have to assume up to 14% of their media budget is basically stolen.

So how do advertisers guard against ad fraud? No one would suggest withdrawing from digital advertising. Instead, treat it like a risk assessment. If you were investing money on Wall Street, you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. You would diversify with a mix of instruments like stocks, bonds, mutual funds etc., each weighted for a purpose.  Likewise you diversify your media placement to capture your target audience throughout their journey to purchase. Use of Out-of-Home in-mall advertising not only captures consumers during the broader journey, it can even help steer them in the last few footsteps before a purchase. When combined with digital and other traditional media, the advertiser can have a more comprehensive campaign targeting their audience across multiple mediums and mitigate the loss of communication ad fraud creates.

The term “Media Mix” is as relevant today as it was before the days of digital advertising.