Ad Fraud is a terminology given to describe a junction of tactics used to deceive advertising platforms for financial gain by molding the digital ads and stopping them from reaching the intended audiences. The attempt is to forge actual user behavior for personal profit by promoting fraudulent activity on the advertising platforms. Such malicious tactics are carried out using bots, software development kits, SDK, and click injection.
We had an opportunity to discuss the impacts of ad frauds on the marketing realm with Faisal Abidi, the co-founder of RNF Technologies, who has adept marketing expertise and experience in the field. In our detailed conversation with him, we found how ad fraudsters are hurting genuine advertisers and decreasing the overall value of the advertisements.
In the upcoming segments, you will find revelations about how ad frauds are impacting anyone and everyone and what needs to be done before it’s too late!
Marketers Are Ignorant To Ad Fraud: Let’s Find Out Why
According to Faisal Abidi, ad fraudhas done some astronomical damage to the marketing industry. A new census reckons that the ad fraudsters will make losses of $100 billion by the coming 2023. Given the stats, there are still a few marketers who are turning their back on the existence of ad fraud and not taking it seriously, which could cause havoc in the coming future.
To avoid the dominance of ad fraud techniques that have become so prevalent and sophisticated that it is hard to distinguish them, all the marketers must unify as one and show some dedicated effort to fight the damages already done.
Below-mentioned can be some of the reasons behind marketers being ignorant of ad fraud and burying their heads in the sand like nothing dangerous is happening around them:
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Lack Of Awareness
The primary reason could be the lack of awareness about ad fraud and its significance to the success of any campaign. Faisal Abidi, also leading a development and branding arm of RNF Technologies, Resourcifi, believes it might be challenging to identify the damage caused by fraudsters with so many players competing together in such a diverse ecosystem.
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Acceptance Of The Fraud
Ad fraud has existed for a while, and many marketing organizations have accepted it as a necessary evil that comes as part and parcel of business. However, since ad fraud can be stopped, this mindset frequently permits bad actors to keep sapping advertising revenue.
● Budget Issue
Let’s suppose that a marketer is aware of the ad fraud but what if they don’t have enough budget to fight it? The budget issue is one of the reasons that marketers take a back seat and turn deaf ears to the problems. In order to grow ad revenues, marketers find it better to spend their money on campaigns or to hire advertising experts rather than investing it in the implementation of yet another SaaS tool. Little are the marketers aware of the fact that several pocket-friendly ad fraud identification tools are worth investing every penny of their hard-earned money.
Types Of Ad Frauds Every Marketer Should Be Aware Of
The number of ad frauds is quite impossible to be placed in one place, and the list mentioned below is not exhaustive, but you can get a fair picture of a few primary ad frauds methods used by bad actors:
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Click Fraud
Faisal Abidi, the co-founder of Resourcifi, and a marketing guru, considers click fraud the most basic and well-understood kind of advertising fraud. Such frauds generate fake traffic using automated clicking platforms or click farms, but the downfall is that no matter how high the online ads ratio, the company won’t witness a sale out of it.
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Ad Stacking
Programmatic ad placements are a common source of ad stacking. When a publisher buys numerous advertisements on a website, they are stacked on top of one another in this situation. This, in return, causes obscuring of the genuine advertisement by another advertiser to gain the part of obtained impressions.
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Pixel Stuffing
Pixel stuffing and ad stacking are synonymous with each other. In this scenario, bad actors knowingly stuff the advertisements within pixels, making it impossible for the customers to notice. As a result, your company is paying for impressions even if there is no likelihood that the advertisement will actually be seen.
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Geo Masking
Geo masking is a trick used by scammers to pass off low-quality traffic as high-quality, so they may charge more for it when selling it to advertisers. Geo masking is accomplished by forging users’ IP addresses.
Tips To Prevent Ad Fraud
In our brief colloquy with Faisal Abidi, he shared some proactive tips his marketing team at RNF Technologies uses to prevent getting trapped in ad fraud. Check them out-
- The first tip talks about bringing disparate systems, teams, and individuals together time and again to concentrate on curating a comprehensive approach that will combat ad fraud in real-time.
- Assigning the fraud detection task to a group of individuals for a better outcome. You can gather individuals from different teams to collaborate and communicate their ideas on ad fraud indications because each team member will be impacted by ad fraud.
- The last but not the least tip would be incorporating valuable tools and solutions that can be used as armor to combat ad fraud. Additionally, the content management system, customer relationship management system, and analytic solutions must be aligned together to defeat ad fraud at its core.
Key Takeaways
Ad fraud can be a growing problem in the marketing world, but that’s not the end– one can overcome challenges thrown at them by bad actors while merely changing the organization’s approach toward marketing. Ensure that your organization has anchored a modern marketing analytics platform to gain valuable insights and metrics of the campaign. Marketing teams can efficiently manage their budgets more wisely and have longer-term success if they take a data-focused approach to ad fraud. It’s never too late to embrace the changes, so bring it now and experience skyrocketing ROI and lead generation!
