'Brands should be spending 10-15% of their marketing budgets to combat ad fraud'

With all the benefits that the digital boom came with for the marketers, came a deep threat of fraudulent activities, eating a huge chunk of their media investments. From bot fraud to CTV to general and sophisticated invalid traffic, the problems are many and only growing. As per the recent ad-fraud report by tecArc, ad frauds are projected to go up in the range of 45-55 per cent compared to the present industry average of 25-35 per cent in the post-pandemic world.

Xaxis India National Head of Client Engagement Dimpy Yadav says, “Historically, lack of transparency has been a part of the ecosystem ever since the dawn of digital media advertising. As programmatic advertising continues to evolve, transparency issues are now being addressed with new age media measurement. While ad verification tools are ensuring advertisers on the quality of the inventory being assessed and providing brand-safe environment with measures being applied, advertisers still unknowingly abdicate their control on media deliveries and transparency due to lack of understanding on the available measurement & evaluation of the technology stack.”

This calls for heightened awareness and scrutiny on marketers' part to keep a tab on such fraudulent activities and save precious marketing monies and also brand image.

Grapes Digital Founder and CEO Himanshu Arya points out, “Ad fraud is a major concern in the digital advertising landscape, which needs the attention of the players in the ad tech ecosystem. Advertisers are losing money when they pay for ads that are shown to bots and not actual consumers, which affects the validity of their campaign results.”

MMA India Country Head Moneka Khurana adds, “Marketers should be and are spending at least 10-15% of their overall marketing budgets these days to identify and combat ad fraud. And it is very important to make this investment at the right time and stage otherwise they can lose much more both monetarily and image-wise.”

The industry shares their preferred models and tools that marketers can rely on to effectively combat this growing menace.

Assess, Combat, Track

Khurana talks about the MMA-suggested ACT process to fight ad fraud. She notes that the first and foremost step is to get aware about fraudulent and possible illegal activities and act on them as soon as possible.

She elaborates, “We start with assessing the fraud; continuous tracking of clicks, site visits, and views is important. Both, unrealistically high and unnaturally low numbers and activities are to be identified and acted upon. MMA also provides free tools to identify suspicious activity. Next, you can use third party solutions to combat the fraud and continue with tracking activities.”

Work with credible vendors

It is extremely important to have third-party service providers and partners to combat ad fraud, who are proficient in their services, the industry opines.

Arya shares, “There are various factors to look at digital fraud. If one observes unusual things happening frequently, such as repeated visits from the same user agent, peak in the number of clicks, 100% bounce rate then one should not ignore such things. If we can start scrutinising effectively and examine the results sharply, it can save advertisers valuable resources and capital. It is important to analyse and understand the data, and work with only credible vendors to help identify fraud. Advertisers need to use tools that help in tracking and alerting them if any fraud happens. By doing all this, one can make the right decision on where to spend money in digital advertising."

Yadav further shares an example, “The critical move for depleting ad fraud is to empower advertisers to put a greater focus on transparency. IAB introduced their ‘ads.txt’ solution for addressing the issue of programmatic ad fraud, a $16 billion problem in 2017. Publishers need to simply place an ads.txt file on their domain thereby joining a list of authorized resellers of their inventory. Sellers would do the same, showing publisher inventory they are authorized to sell. In 2019, IAB announced the app-ads.txt which provides transparency for app-based environments of the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Ads.txt and app-ads.txt deliver transparency-focused path & advantages to advertisers, publishers and tech providers by fundamentally bringing transparency in the supply path by helping eliminate the unauthorized resellers of inventory, flag domain spoofing and other dark and deceptive fraudulent practices leading to ad fraud. This inturn delivers immediate advantages for advertisers, publishers and transparency-focused tech providers.”

Blockchain is the way ahead

Yadav continues, “With the growth of programmatic media, it has become essential to have a scalable solution to tackle media supply-chain transparency. When looking to the future, the media advertising world is adopting cryptocurrency (blockchain), a digital currency which brings transparency to the entire media ecosystem. Blockchain makes media flow very transparent, efficient & accountable by providing the visibility of spends from start to finish.

Blockchain is one of the most widely discussed technologies in today’s time. As the technology introduces distributed verifiability, audit-ability and consensus, multiple brands are eliminating fraud with advanced analytics empowered with blockchain.”

The industry presses that no brands could neglect the need of investing in all these levels to deal with the pertinent issues of ad fraud.