Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry and is growing rapidly. Online advertising has became the ideal choice for small and large businesses to effectively target their audiences to scale up their businesses. However, with the increasing popularity of online advertising, the issue of ad fraud has also emerged. Today, we cover some of the most common types of ad fraud and how to avoid them.
Invisible and Hidden Ads
This attempt create hidden ads which makes the ad invisible on the website. But, still the Impression will be reported to the ad server. This type of ads were reported as viewable impressions because the ads displayed on the screen but are not visible by user. There are various methods used in the ad-fraud:
- Displays an ad in a 1×1 pixel Iframe. Even if end users do not realize it, they view multiple ads and click on them unknowingly
- Display the ads outside of the viewport area which is completely invisible
- Display several ads in an single Iframe ad slot, which means out of all the ads loaded, only one will actually be visible to the user and the rest will be stacked behind the visible ad.
Impression Laundering(Domain Spoofing)
It is an attempt of making an impression look as if its appearing on a site when in fact is appearing on another site through ‘laundered’ ad calls.
The advertiser purchases impressions from a selected publisher(one with a relevant audience and content)for their campaign whereas, part of the ad impressions bought by the advertiser are served on fraudulent websites(neither the audience nor the content is relevant to the advertiser’s brand).This attempt works through a number of nested ad calls through Iframe, where the advertiser assumes the ads are serving on the selected publisher but really it’s serving on fraudulent website.
Hijacking Ads
Hijacking ads can be done by malware which hijacks the publisher’s ad placement by changing ad tags placed by the publisher to ad tags controlled by the attacker. When the user clicks on such ad, the attacker redirects the user to a different site(by inserting an onClick event on the Iframe with the ad) instead of advertiser’s website. This approach will help attackers to steal a potential client from the advertiser by displaying their ad and generating revenue for the attacker rather than for the publisher.
Click Farms
Click farms are organizations that pay individuals to generate clicks on online advertisements. These farms usually operate in countries with low labour costs, and they use a large number of low-cost labourer’s to physically click through the ads and generate a significant number of clicks.
Bot Traffic
Basically, These are computer programs that are designed to mimic real user behavior. They are programmed to click on a particular ads repeatedly which will potentially increases the number of clicks and impressions. As these bots represents a real user behavior which makes it harder to detect fraud.
Attribution Manipulation
As like bot traffic this approach uses bots which are programmed to perform an action like sending clicks and installs to the server. Click Injection is one of the major attribution manipulation technique where the fraudulent apps downloaded by the users generate fake clicks and take credit for the installation of other apps. But the clicks were actually bot-generated and not human-generated.
How Ad Fraud affecting Both Publishers and Advertisers:
Wasting Advertising Spend
Ad fraud can result in wasting the budget for the impressions and clicks which are not genuine and might makes the advertisers to endup with no sales(or) conversions.
Loss of credibility
Ad fraud can directly impact the brand’s reputation as they are tied up with placing relevant ads on the right place and right environment. Placing ads on the irrelevant sites and unbrand safe environment might mislead the user and result in losing the trust on the brand.
Reduced Sales and ROI
Ad fraud mostly incorporates bots to generates fake clicks and installs for the ad which will not lead to conversion path. As these type of clicks were induced by bots and not by the actual user who is looking for purchasing something.
Conclusion
Ad frauds are extremely harmful to the businesses as it increases Ad spend wastage, Incorrect data analysis and loss of reputation. Therefore detecting and preventing ad-fraud is the most important thing in online advertising for both advertisers and publishers. It is completely impossible to eradicate ad fraud but we can avoid it as much as we can. There are various ways available in the industry to avoid ad-fraud such as implementing ad verification measurement, Blocking suspicious IP’s, Bot monitoring software and much more. Most of the brands are already make using of such technologies to deliver their ads on a bot-free and brand-safe environment.