Every day, millions of digital ads vie for user eyeballs as competition for mobile application downloads becomes increasingly cutthroat. As competition peaks, marketing leaders are required to continuously attract and retain engaged target users on either Google Play or the App Store. However, marketers are facing an ongoing battle with fraudsters bombarding mobile campaigns with invalid traffic. And, unless marketers act soon, this problem is only set to snowball beyond marketers’ control.
The current statistics around ad fraud paint a grim picture. According to a report, the rate of install frauds occurring on mobile apps worldwide in 2021 was 7 per cent for Apple iOS apps and 12 per cent for Android apps. Last year, meanwhile, Apple had to deactivate around 170 million fraudulent customer accounts. iOS apps were also found to have a whopping 20 per cent post-attribution fraud rate.
Most worrying of all is the prediction that the total cost of ad fraud will increase to $100 billion by 2023. Historically, ad fraud was more associated with display ads and poor-quality publishers. However, fraudsters are notoriously adept at keeping 10 steps ahead of their victims. As smartphone usage continually increases in Asia Pacific, so naturally will the scale of fraud.
Types of mobile ad fraud on the rise in Asia Pacific include click flooding and click injection.
The former hits organic instals the hardest and occurs when bad actors send a large number of fraudulent click reports in order to get paid by advertisers for the last click before installation.
Click injection meanwhile is a more advanced version of click flooding and sees a fraudster ‘infect’ a user device at the OS level and monitors all the instals. The click is triggered just before an app is fully installed and the organic install will be attributed to the fraudster.
Without swift and decisive intervention, the scale of ad fraud will only keep snowballing and syphoning marketing budgets.
Attacks of fraudulent traffic mean money is spent on ads that are never viewed by the intended audience. This leads to invalid clicks that are highly unlikely to convert to genuine user downloads, meaning any ad budget dedicated to these clicks is effectively wasted.
In addition to wasted media spend, ad fraud can also have an indirect run-on effect on a business’s bottom line. A single install attributed to the wrong source will inflate the value of that source not just by one install, but by the value of all the subsequent events of that new user.
But when that new user is a bot, then the marketing data becomes polluted, which in turn impacts optimisation. Marketers can end up over-investing in fraudulent sources based on informal value transfer systems (IVTs) that will deliver the worst results, which ultimately restricts their advertising return-on-investment.
Also read: How To Protect Brands From Misleading Content Online
So what should be done? Although app stores have put in some efforts to prevent ad fraud on mobile apps, most marketers either don’t have fraud prevention or their existing tools lack key cutting-edge capabilities.
They may have already started to defend their ad campaigns by using mobile measurement partners (MMPs), but these come with heavy limitations. Fraudsters can easily manipulate MMPs into attributing the fraud as the click provider, thereby still claiming the rewards for delivering the clicks. Marketers are therefore still left with inaccurate, misleading and unusable attribution.
Key strategies to fight the fraud
However, there are three key tips for marketers to put up a stronger defence. The first is to protect against fraud through a multi-layer strategy during the whole user journey. This should integrate ad fraud prevention technology in real-time from the ad click to the user download. In addition, it includes installation verification through post-attribution verification, which is when you can track attribution credit.
The next key step is to prevent fraudsters from entering the MMP for potential misattribution. Tactics include automatically removing invalid site IDs and only attributing from accurate and clean traffic. Partnering with a network may also help build cleaner source ecosystems.
Finally, marketers can power up their resources with machine learning (ML) solutions that can provide analytics to predict the likelihood of fraud and detect anomalies, perform predictive modelling and find clusters to identify new and earlier indicators of fraud. Research has suggested that ML technology could save advertisers over $10 billion a year in ad spend that would have been wasted on fraud.
Brands have every incentive to crack down on ad fraud and that is why anti-fraud initiatives should be driven by marketing teams. By adopting a strong stance against ad fraud from the top-down, brands can successfully adopt ad fraud technology and best internal practices on how to use it and how it will impact their business.
All advertisers should integrate real-time ad fraud technology into their platforms to ensure optimal advertising performance, high-value user acquisition and engagement. Marketers who capitalise on this technology will soon see an increase in advertising ROI, have faster campaign optimisation and save time on manual processes as well. And soon a snowball will appear no bigger than a snowflake.
About Author
TrafficGuard’s Global SVP Industry Solutions, Scott Hamilton, is a seasoned advertising professional with a strong sales and management background. He plays a leading role in driving commercial growth and positioning TrafficGuard as the leading ad fraud prevention solution provider. With over 18 years of experience, Scott has held executive commercial positions at leading media organisations such as BBC Worldwide, ACP Publishing, and Yahoo. Most recently, he has held strategic leadership positions, such as Vevo, Guvera and Appier.
