Some months ago via Social Media (Twitter, then LinkedIn) I met someone who seemed to resonate the same concerns around the massive growth in 'Ad Fraud'. For those of you who are regular readers of my blogs you will know this is a subject matter I've been banging on about for the last 5 years.

The latest 'Juniper' research suggest that ad fraud is set to rise to circa $100 Billion by 2023, and there are others like Dr Fou, and myself who believe that even that is just the tip of a very large fraudulent iceberg, an iceberg that continues to help the ad industry implode in on itself.

The guy I connected with is 'Dr Augustine Fou' and if, you like me are interested in the abuse that's ripping off circa 50% of every ad dollar that's spent you might want to follow him as well.

The forecast from Juniper also suggest that in what is still the wild west of digital advertising most of the increase in fraud will occur when ad tech and programmatic is fed into our Smart TV devices, which by the way is already happened........

In the article (link below) he talks about how marketeers should also take hold of some of the responsibility around due diligence, and not just accept the headlines from the retained media agency.

Marketers need to take a detailed look at their own analytics to workout how to prevent ad fraud, Dr Fou said.

  • Ask for line item details. If you only see aggregate numbers on a monthly or daily basis, you’re not going to see fraud as easily, he said. For example, when an ad slot opens up, the site will announce it’s open for bidding, and the algorithms that represent ad buyers will bid, with someone winning. Win rates are usually about 10 percent, Fou said. If you’re seeing win rates of 90 percent, something is wrong. Legitimate publishers can’t let every site win. Marketers can turn off that fraudulent website and not buy from it anymore.
  • Examine bids won vs ad impressions served. For each bid won, an ad impression should be served. Look for discrepancies. Compare your DSP reports for bids won, by domain, to your ad server reports, by domain, Fou said. Look for data discrepancies where the impressions served is far lower than the bids won, by domain. Identify domains that have greater than 10 percent discrepancy and study them further; then turn them off if you agree it is fraud.
  • Look at your ad serving volume by hour. Be sure quantities on your ad server report are reported by hour, and look at whether all of the volume is spent in the first hour or during sleeping hours. If that’s taking place, you have no impressions left for the day and your budget is wasted, he said.

Or you could start to take a serious look at Social Selling, there is an alternative way, come with me.