A Mirage in The Desert of Digital Advertising: Will You Find Your Way?

Imagine walking through a desert, thirsty for genuine leads and conversions. Suddenly, an oasis emerges—a slew of clicks, installs, and engagements. Your marketing efforts are paying off, but is this too good to be true? There are masterminds in the digital ecosystem who go above and beyond advertisers’ thinking capacity to steal their money. They are becoming deceptive, weaving a well-planned plot to keep the advertisers unaware of the truth.

As a result, advertisers frequently believe what they see and continue to invest advertising dollars in these “painted ad campaigns. “Despite the high traffic, the advertiser’s ROI remains low. But let us shed some light on this cleverly constructed web using the example of publisher A.

Click Spamming: A Mirage of Good Traffic

Advertisers see some excellent traffic sources in the ad traffic mix directed by publisher A. The advertiser trusts publisher A, and the publisher gets their payout. However, the reality is a bit twisted, which advertisers often miss.

In reality, the advertiser pays for its organic traffic.

To keep the advertiser in the dark, the publisher employs click spamming. Using this ad fraud technique, the publisher generates random clicks and steals the genuine source’s last-click attribution, known as ‘organic poaching.’

Despite the background fraud, the advertiser sees “unsuspicious traffic” in their ad campaigns. The fraudulent publishers use click spamming to meet hard KPIs such as purchases to make it more credible. This removes the possibility of doubt for advertisers and publishers to receive their payment.

Bot Traffic: Orchestrators of Deception

Too good to be true, things are often questionable.

As a result, the publisher uses bots to add stale traffic to their basket. They inflate ad traffic to meet the predetermined standard of generating high traffic. Bots and fake devices, on the other hand, have distinct abnormal patterns. This gives the advertiser the impression that the incoming traffic could be cleaner. While the advertiser eliminates invalid traffic using an ad traffic validation partner, the publisher still wins.

Incentive Traffic: Smoke and Mirrors

The preceding examples were only the tip of the iceberg. After successfully shaping the advertiser’s perception by displaying organic and bot-driven traffic, the publisher proceeds to the final stage of their illusion game.

They run incentive campaigns to hit that last pinnacle of trust of the advertiser.

They placed the advertiser’s campaign on incentivized platforms to meet the soft KPIs. Incentive campaigns typically have a high click-to-install/action rate.

However, users’ lifetime value could be higher because they install the app to benefit from its features. As a result, traffic could be of better quality.

How to Come Out of This Mirage?

Advertisers can combat bot traffic using a basic ad traffic validation partner. They can help evaluate traffic quality using bot-pattern analysis. However, these validation partners frequently fail to identify sophisticated patterns like click spamming and incentive fraud.

These fraud techniques impact event quality and, in turn, skew an ad campaign’s analytics. They create a “good traffic scenario” so that the advertiser remains unaware of the reality behind the smoke screen.

To combat sophisticated fraud activities, advertisers require an advanced ad fraud solution capable of detecting invalid traffic throughout the funnel and going beyond traditional methods of ad fraud verification.

mFilterIt – Your Mirror of Reality

Arm yourself with mFilterIt, an ad traffic validation solution that enables advertisers to detect abnormal ad traffic across the funnel in real-time. Using AI, ML, and data science, we provide full-funnel transparency of ad campaigns, allowing advertisers to make informed business decisions, avoid the mirage, and see the reality behind this web of deception.

Way towards a Transparent Digital Advertising Ecosystem

In today’s ever-changing digital landscape, ad fraud remains a constant battle for businesses. You can protect your advertising investments and confidently navigate the digital realm by demystifying its dark art, recognizing its perpetrators, and embracing innovative defence strategies.