Ad frauds in India close to Rs 5000 cr: Himanshu Nagrecha, TrafficGuard

At the exchange4media TechManch 2023, advertisers, agencies and experts came together to speak about the evolving role of technology and creativity in the field of advertising. Ad fraud, one of the most pressing issues in advertising and marketing, was addressed in a keynote speech titled 'Ad Fraud Unmasked: The Invisible Threat of Digital Advertising' by Himanshu Nagrecha, VP of Customer Growth, India & South Asia, TrafficGuard. 

Speaking about the growing digital spends in India, Nagrecha said, “To understand the scale of ad fraud, we first need to understand the scale of digital advertising. So by the end of 2023, digital advertising will be almost half of all the ad spends in India, which means we are talking of numbers of about Rs 51,000 crore annually that will be spent on digital advertising. Of this, there are estimates that close to about 10 per cent of the budget is wasted on invalid traffic and ad fraud, which means the size of ad fraud in India is close to about Rs 5000 crores.”

Talking about the waste of money, while shooting in the dark, he said, “TrafficGuard has worked with advertisers in India, and globally. We have seen that ad fraud is pretty much visible across all the different digital media channels. We have seen close to about 12 percent of spending are wasted on invalid traffic or ad fraud close to about 47 percent of installs are invalid or attributed to the wrong source because of the ad frauds and about 23 percent of conversions are invalid due to misattributions. We see it is across all the channels that we are with that advertisers or marketers deploy.”

He explained that ad fraud on the other hand is a kind of invalid traffic that is mostly driven intentionally to harm your campaign objectives. It is driven for the financial gains by the partner's.

Nagrecha also explained the types of ad fraud, he said, “Most of us are familiar with the kind of ad frauds but still some of them are very prevalent and are popular ones like location fraud, bots, malwarees, click farm, domain spoofing, ad stacking, cookie stuffing, incentivize ad.”

Talking on how Traffic Guard is helping and growing, he said, “We have spent more than six years developing digital measurement advertising solutions as well as fraud mitigation solutions. We are a listed company listed on the Australian stock exchanges. More than half of our team comprises of Google Certified ads partner as well as the cloud partner and on a monthly basis we measure close to about 100 billion-plus transactions/ Transactions here means the digital currency of impression click installs or any other conversion that in Market here would want us to measure and verify for them.”