Solutions
Digital ad fraud is the deliberate misrepresentation or manipulation of engagement metrics to generate fake traffic and impressions, which negatively impacts click-through and performance rates and ultimately revenue generation! The estimates for global digital advertising are expected to reach $800 billion for 2024 with over 10% annually being fraudulent or some $80 billion / year!
Most leading publishers attempt to minimize the fraud on their sites. However, advertisers and publishers can have their priorities out of alignment when it comes to preventing ad fraud. A publisher still may generate short term benefits from fraudulent advertising, whereas fraud is extremely costly to the advertiser both in direct cost as well as reputation erosion.
Display advertising represents approximately 30% of the Global Digital Ad spend with over $25 billion considered to be fraudulent. The leading sources of fraud are geo-masking, ad stacking, data center traffic, click spamming & domain spoofing. Staying vigilant can help significantly reduce digital ad fraud by tracking unusual traffic patterns, geographic inconsistencies, repeat visitors, high bounce rates & abnormally low conversion rates.
Video advertising is the fastest growing segment for ad spend (almost 20% per year) and introduces a different type of fraud in additional to the more traditional display ad fraud. Some of the video specific fraud includes extremely high completion rates, multiple languages different from the video content, "below the fold" auto play and pixel stuffing. Video Ad networks will provide lots of data about what publishing sites are buying ads. Being able to monitor your publishers' sites can be an incredibly cost-effective activity to improve the ROI on your video ad spend.
There are many software companies that develop products to go after ad fraud; however, the challenge is that the hackers / fraudsters are constantly introducing new tactics to stay ahead of these detection tools. Most detection tools tend to be a “black box” solution, whereas LUX empowers the digital ad specialist to closely monitor their ads on a real time basis, looking for fraud! LUX can save an organization countless hours each month, automating the inspection of the fraudulent scenarios. LUX enables the domain expert to be extremely focused on the most important or highest volume publishers. The marketing specialist can use LUX to iterate on the detection rules and only block or blacklist those sites that the advertiser is highly confident are fraudulent. False positives in fraud detection also can adversely impact the ROI an ad campaign. LUX’s open architecture enables advertisers to also integrate any highly specialized fraud detection tool or performance data into a holistic strategy.