Ad fraud is eating up advertisers’ budgets and they are looking for a corrective action.

Forrester’s latest report on ad fraud and viewability estimates that the amount of money wasted on invalid impressions reached $7.4 billion in 2016, and this is only for desktop and laptop impressions in the US. At the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, called the current system “antiquated” and demanded increased transparency around media buying and viewability.

It’s clear that there is a serious industry problem that requires attention, but there is some debate over how it should be solved. who should take the lead? Here are different types of companies that have staked a claim on cleaning ad traffic.

Marketing tech companies

Digital marketing hubs are investing in ad tech to provide CMOs with a one-stop-shop for CRM, including the ability to verify digital ad measurements.  

Oracle’s data cloud has new fraud detection capabilities following the Moat acquisition. Salesforce added to its portfolio the ability to track traffic across multiple devices and channels after acquiring Krux. Adobe also made a move towards digital ad serving with its acquisition of TubeMogul a video demand side platform.

Network security vendors

Network security companies including antivirus and firewall vendors have the most experience fighting hackers, which enables them to use more sophisticated methods to discover fraud schemes.  

Many scams will fall below the radar of fraud systems are limited to looking for suspicious traffic. Take for example the Traffic Alchemist scam, where fraudsters bought junk traffic known for long viewing times, disguised the sites to appear reputable, cluttered the site with hidden pop-up ads and then cycled the traffic through site clusters to keep measurements within a normal range that won’t raise suspicion.

Ad verification companies

Marketing technology companies and ad networks can also choose to build their own relationship with ad verification companies that specialise in tools developed specifically to inspect and clean digital ad traffic.

The advantage those companies have is that they specialise in fraud detection and the ad tech industry. It isn’t clear if the movement towards consolidation will result in bigger players owning the technology and embedding the capabilities into their platforms, or if these specialised players will continue to provide their services independently or through partnerships with larger vendors.  

Ad networks

Ad networks are highly motivated to provide clean traffic. Their whole brand depends on traffic quality and they can’t afford to be blacklisted because of bots crawling their networks. They need to guard their reputation by partnering with vendors or acquiring technology that ensures verifiable measurements of ad effectiveness.

Ad tech companies

Ad technology companies which provide a wide range of services from ad creative to ad targeting and measurements also provide anti-fraud solutions. Retargeting company Ad Roll detects and blocks invalid traffic, and has a Trust and Safety team dedicated to fraud detection. Sizmek, an ad serving company, eradicates ad fraud with its latest solution, StrikeAd. Mobile app tracking firm Adjust announced that a group of app marketing platforms came together to battle mobile ad fraud.  

No single solution

There isn’t a simple solution to stop ad fraud and there is no one single player that can be trusted to ensure ad quality. Even after Google has cleaned up its traffic, it’s possible that data marketing hubs such as Oracle will still find suspicious data that slipped through their net. Multiple layers of defense are needed since no single system is 100% fool proof.

The best hope is to have all the players agree on a standard definition for quality traffic that can be enforced by objective third-party auditors. Eventually, there should be readily available third-party tools that will be accepted by the industry to root out fraud. Similar to scanning and cleaning files from viruses, all ad traffic should be purged of fraud before being shared and analysed.

The ad tech industry is still nascent and fraud and fraud detection solutions keep evolving. Until there are industry-wide policies for cleaning traffic, each player will most likely clean the traffic the best way they can, which probably won’t be good enough for advertisers.

Eventually- when more hold back their budgets – companies will need to reach consensus and the auditors will move in to bring trust back to digital advertising.

The post Who Should Lead the Battle Against Ad Fraud? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

App install and transaction fraud are becoming too large to ignore. Hundreds of thousands of apps exist, across nearly every mobile system, for practically any type of digital interaction and content consumption. Fraud can happen at any stage, from clicks to installs to gameplay.  

In-app fraud is more difficult to detect than web fraud since developers can sneak in functionality that is more difficult to inspect. In addition, as long as the user experience is satisfactory and apps aren’t draining batteries, fraudsters can continue faking downloads, app usage and opening apps without anyone knowing the difference.

Here are seven things about in-app fraud that can help brands protect their ad budgets.

1. All devices are impacted

Although devices that are not jailbroken have a lower chance of being hacked, they are still vulnerable. For example, if an iPhone 6 has Siri enabled, the Gambino glitch can provide a “backdoor” into the phone. More than 86% of Apple iPhones in the world with versions prior to iOS 9.3.5 are vulnerable to a security flaw that allows a hacker to completely take over the device with just a text message.

There are steps you can take to ensure you are protected. These include updating your phone’s firmware to the latest version, deleting text messages from an unknown sender, keeping the device in ‘lock’ mode when not in use and only downloading apps from a trusted source.

2. Illegitimate apps appear in legitimate stores

Sizmek found dozens of blacklisted developers’ apps on both Google Play and the App Store. The New York Times recently reported a deluge of fake apps appearing in legitimate app stores right before Christmas.

They can be relatively harmless — essentially junk apps that served up annoying pop-up ads. However, there are potential risks to using a fake app; for example, inputting your credit card information exposes customers to potential fraud. Also, some fake apps contain malware that can steal personal information or even lock the phone until the user pays a ransom.

3. Apps can fake their popularity

Computer-generated qualitative reviews are posted giving fraudulent apps a higher probability of being distributed. Typically the fake reviews are posted gradually over time so that rankings won’t rise too quickly to set off a red flag. There are steps you can take to spot these fake reviews. Be careful of the phrasing being used, it tends to be the same style and wording and in most cases the text is even identical. Users can also look through reviews and can spot apps that are all using the same services to acquire app reviews and have the same reviewers.

4. Fraudulent apps are often polite

They operate when connected to electricity and WiFi and when the screen is off. By not being intrusive, or bothersome, fraudulent ads can continue working without interruption. This provides a way to continually serve mobile ads, ads mind you, that aren’t even being seen.

The developers of such apps are very tricky, often purporting to be a similar version of an existing online store, for example, a recent case of the fraudulent Overstock Inc app mimicking the existing Overstock.com deals app. These ‘me-too’ apps lure consumers in and are a cause for confusion as to which app is actually genuine.

5. Every stage is faked

Fraudulent ad bots can also fake movements within a game such as opening an app, clicking and moving around a card in Solitaire to meet a specific KPI that results in charges to an advertiser.

Chat bots are now being used in contact centres to have a conversation with customers, simulating gameplay is far less sophisticated. They even make sure they don’t win too quickly to avoid suspicion. Since this activity closely resembles genuine human actions, the bots are harder to detect by anti-fraud systems that look at behaviour to determine whether impressions came from humans or not.

6. Fraudsters bypass protection systems

KPIs used to verify ads will increase from downloading a game app to opening the app, to playing and then engaging for a specified period of time. The difficulty is that just as quickly as marketers build a higher wall to protect themselves, fraudsters will continue to climb over them and in the long term, it’s not an effective means of protection.

One way for advertisers to ensure that ad traffic is valid is to detect and weed out bot-generated traffic before making a final call on what percentage of the traffic is viewable. By combining fraud detection with viewability they can be more certain that ads are legitimate and fully rendered and within viewing range on screens of mobile devices.

7. Ads masquerading as other apps

Another form of fraud is having advertisers pay for ad impressions that don’t really appear on the premium app they expected and paid for. For example, a flashlight app can claim there are views over an extended period of time. But when the app is opened, users aren’t even looking at the screen, and marketers would have no idea that they are paying for ads that the viewer never saw.

Another downside to these types of apps is that when a user opens the flashlight app, a web page will open stating the device is infected with malware and the user needs to download an anti-malware app. In worst cases, the ad will trick users into actually downloading malware on the device.

There is a lot of cleaning up to do when it comes to in-app ads. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. You have to look for signs that don’t add up and research further. It’s not always about technical tools; it’s about being aware and giving hints to teams where there might be a problem. Combining data with common sense can be the best way to protect marketing budgets and keep in-app fraud at bay.

The post Seven Things You Should Know About In-App Fraud appeared first on PerformanceIN.