According to projections by the Statista Research Department, North America is said to suffer the highest economic losses because of online advertising fraud in 2028. It is set to account for 42% of the 173 billion US Dollars in ad fraud losses forecast for that year, followed by Far East & China with 20% and Western Europe with 17%. If you don’t take action now, your ads could be the next victim.

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But don’t panic just yet. Your ads might be a bit vulnerable now, but they don’t have to be. With the right detection strategies and defense mechanisms, you’re all set to tackle any fraud coming your way. This blog dives into exactly what ad fraud is, how it works, and how you can defend your ads.

Ad Frauds: A Rising Threat

Ad fraud is costing advertisers billions worldwide. But what is it all about?

Ad fraud refers to the malicious activity of creating deceptive ads that harm the user clicking on them. For advertisers, this can mean anything that harms either the perception, the outcome, or the performance of the ad. It usually affects advertisers, publishers, and users who are less digitally savvy by posing as an invisible threat.

It can be done for a lot of reasons.

• Scammers and fraudsters might create ads that redirect users to a completely different page to steal their personal information.
• Publishers might scam advertisers by providing fake impressions and profiting off of it.
• Even your competitors might create false advertisements that tarnish your image or use click spam to exhaust your budget.

While it is done for plenty of reasons, there’s one common motive: financial gain.

Why Advertisers Should Care

So the question is, why should you, as an advertiser, care? You’re not getting affected yet… or are you? Many times, you won’t even realize that you are.

Your ads might be getting clicks by bots instead of real users, or the targeting by the ad network might be totally off. You’ll keep changing your strategy, thinking there’s something wrong with it, when the actual problem is completely different.

Ad fraud can come in the form of fake impressions, fake clicks, and fake audiences. Unjustified ad placements are also very rampant and often lead to the advertisers feeling unsatisfied with their results. These inaccurate results lead to poor future planning and budget drain.

As an advertiser, you should definitely care about who your ad is getting displayed to, whether the clicks are legit, and if you are getting a decent amount of return from them. If your engagement or ROI feels off, then make sure you do a thorough analysis to check if you are getting scammed.

Ad Fraud Can Affect Your Brand

While financial losses because of ad fraud are a big deal on their own, it doesn’t end there. It negatively impacts your brand in a variety of aspects, and here’s to list a few.

• Sinks your Reputation: When consumers start seeing your ads on low-grade and inappropriate sites, it will put your brand in a negative light. They will trust your brand less and less, ultimately sinking your reputation.
• Decreases your ROI: Very often, ad frauds lead to lower ROIs. Outcomes are poor, and you don’t get the expected worth of your investment.
• Inaccurate Data: When your clicks and impressions are all falsified, there’s no way to know what the accurate insights are. They could either be less than what is shown or even more in certain cases.
• Poor Future Planning: Reviewing inaccurate data will automatically result in poor planning for future campaigns. You might focus on the wrong things instead of the ones that require vital changes.

And the list just goes on if you don’t tackle it in time.

How Ad Fraud Works: Watch Out For These

There’s no one way in which scammers conduct ad fraud. Some might be using tactics that we haven’t even identified yet, but here’s a list of the ones that are most commonly used.

Click Fraud/Bot Fraud

Click fraud is a type of fraud that is carried out by bots and works by generating fake clicks for the ad. Advertisers are made to believe that they are interacting with real human users, but instead, it’s just the ad fraud bots trying to deceive them. This fraud is usually seen with PPC or pay-per-click ads and results in advertisers exhausting their budget way too soon.

Click Spamming

Click spam is another form of PPC fraud that specifically targets website and mobile ads. Here, spammers execute clicks on behalf of users who haven’t made them. They begin clicking in the background while the user engages with the website or app, making it look as if they have interacted with the ad itself.

Impression Fraud

Impression fraud happens when scammers (usually publishers in this case) defraud advertisers and ad networks running CPM ad campaigns. They rack up impressions by using bot traffic and making the ads appear in unseen places to make more money. By creating a false perception that ads are getting seen, they increase their ad revenue.

Ad Stacking

In this type of programmatic ad fraud, ads are hidden by publishers from the actual users. They are layered on top of the other, creating a stack with a primary ad on the top. When this primary ad gets an impression or an interaction, it is counted for all the ads stacked up. This is also done for the purpose of increasing ad revenue.

Pixel Stuffing

When multiple are crammed up in a single 1×1 pixel space that makes them invisible to the user, it is termed pixel stuffing. In other words, normal-looking pixels are combined with fraudulent pixels to hide them from the end-users. Impressions and clicks are counted as usual, holding absolutely no value for the user.

Ad Injection

Ad injections are a type of fraud where ads are ‘injected’ or sneaked into places on publishers’ websites where they don’t belong. It can either replace existing ads or add new ones during a user’s session. This not only interrupts the user’s experience by making them see irrelevant ads but also hides the actual ads that have been paid for.

Domain Spoofing

This involves hiding the real domain or identity of a website. Spammers ‘spoof’ or copy the domain of another well-known website by making certain alterations to imitate them.

When advertisers spend money to bid and display their ads on such sites, they are setting themselves up for loss. Although users and impressions from it are real, such low-quality websites are not worth the money spent on them.

Are Your Ads a Victim of Fraud?

Scammers and fraudsters are extremely subtle with their tactics. There’s no way you’ll know you’re being defrauded until you sit down to analyze and notice it specifically. Here’s what you can do.

First, check if you are at risk of advertising fraud. While fraud can generally impact any size and niche of businesses, there are a few that are at high risk. Generally, fraudsters are seen targeting finance businesses, retail/e-commerce stores, and firms offering legal services.

Next, notice the signs. These can be:

• Unusual or lower engagement rates compared to the number of impressions and clicks.
• Lower interactions than what you consider a ‘ base’ standard.
• Unrealistic spikes in impressions and CTR.
• Repeated site visits that lead to no actual engagement or conversion.
• Suspicious traffic sources that don’t really include your target market.
• Higher bounce rates can be a result of bot traffic.

If anything seems unusual, you can further turn to ad fraud detection tools to identify fraudulent activities in your digital advertising campaigns.

Pro Tip: Check for suspicious activities in your ad campaigns every once in a while, even when you don’t see the signs. This can help you identify and eliminate fraud in the early stages.

Prevent Ad Fraud With These Strategies

Advertising fraud can be easily mitigated with the right strategies. Here’s how you can safeguard your campaigns:

Monitor Performance Regularly

To grasp fraud, it’s best to monitor your performance regularly and watch out for any unusual activities in the preliminary stages. Set a ‘base’ standard for yourself depending on past performances, and use it to compare future performances. You can also make projections and compare them with the actual results.

Look out for the ad impressions, click-through rates, legitimacy of website traffic, conversions, and other relevant metrics. If anything looks abnormal or out-of-place to a vast extent, then it can be a sign of ad fraud.

Research Reputable Ad Networks

Your ad delivery largely depends on ad networks, which is why it’s important to partner up with only reliable ones. Research reputable ad networks and check for their:

• publishing partners
• website verification procedure
• quality of ad inventory
• transparency in results and reports
• support system
• reputation in the market

Ensure that they aren’t involved in any kind of fraud themselves before advertising through them.

Implement Multi-Layered Security

The next thing you can do is tighten up your security. Opt for multi-layered security measures like IP blacklisting, device fingerprinting, and behavior analysis that detect and block frauds effectively. It is a sophisticated defensive technique that you can use to safeguard your ads from a variety of frauds.

Monitor Your Competitors

Keep an eye out for what your competitors are up to. Many competitors don’t play fair and might employ bots, fake accounts, and fake referrals to give you a false impression. They might even hire low-paid workers to continuously click on your ads, called ‘click farms.’

So, if you suspect any such activities, block all suspicious IP addresses and consider legal action if the problem persists.

Watch Out For Spoofed Domains

To detect any spoofed domains, you can either use a tool or do searches on your own. Carefully examine your URL and pay close attention to any misspellings and alterations in characters.

For example:

• ‘amazom.com’ instead of ‘amazon.com’
• or using unusual characters like ‘rn’ for the letter m

You can also train your organization to do random checks.

Utilize Fraud Detection Tools and Software

If you see any unusual activity or are at a high risk of digital advertising scams, then utilizing fraud detection tools and services can be your best bet. Invest in tools and software that are accurate, reliable, and can analyze multiple facets of fraud. They should offer full transparency and be capable of providing full-funnel protection.

Target Precise Audiences

If you set your targeting to a very precise location or demographic, you can easily identify any spikes in impressions and clicks from unmentioned sources. This can be an indicator of fraudulent activities being conducted by publishers and ad networks.

Follow the Industry Initiatives

Initiatives and guidelines led by companies like IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) serve as a great marker for ad fraud. Becoming a part of them will give you access to a community that works to combat ad fraud and promote safe practices.

Conclusion

As new technology unfolds and online space becomes more crowded, we are bound to see a rise in the number of ad frauds. Scammers are going to come up with newer tactics that are yet to be discovered. But the good news is that ad fraud is not unbeatable. While there might not be a feasible method to tackle it from the root yet, prevention measures can go a long way.

The bottom line is- you always need to stay one step ahead, prioritize reliable partnerships, and take action against suspicious behavior in the early stages. Make sure your ads get the worth of your investment without any compromises.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is ad fraud?

Ans. Ad fraud refers to malicious activities that affect the perception, outcomes, and performance of digital advertisements. They can severely affect the ad campaigns and cause high losses to the advertisers.

How can I detect ad fraud?

Ans. Advertisers can detect ad fraud by using specific tools and continuously monitoring your campaign’s performance. You can set a base standard and compare it with the actual results to check for any suspicious spikes or falls in the number of impressions, clicks, and engagement.

What are the most common types of ad fraud?

Ans. Click fraud, click spamming, impressions fraud, ad stacking, domain spoofing, pixel stuffing, and ad injections are some of the most common types of ad fraud that you should watch out for.

How can advertisers prevent ad fraud?

Ans. Advertisers can prevent fraud by using tools and software that help in detecting and eliminating fraud throughout the funnel. You can also keep a constant check on your competitors, monitor your performance, watch out for spoofed domains, and implement a multi-layered security system to keep things in check.

Who is at the risk of ad fraud?

Ans. Ad fraud can impact businesses of any size and niche. However, it’s financial businesses, legal firms, and retail/e-commerce stores that are at high risk of ad fraud.

What Do You Understand By Bot Traffic?

Bot traffic can be defined as non-human traffic. This means that bot traffic is not authentic traffic. Rather, it is generated by automated software through fake ad clicks. This traffic does not result in conversions and, therefore, does not generate any revenue, as it is not real at all. Some bots are not harmful as they just try to track the performance of your website. Some, on the other hand, try to scrap or extract data from your website or deliberately try to overwhelm your website with traffic ( fake traffic ) so that your website’s working gets affected.

Types Of Bots

Broadly, there are two types of bots – good bots and bad bots. Let’s discuss the differences between the two and why good bots are good and bad bots are bad.

Good Bots

Firstly, we will discuss about good bots. These perform several functions that make them good. The most common types of good bots are:

• Search Engine Bots: Search engine bots are among the most important bots. The reason for this is that they help you in indexing the pages of your website. If they do not crawl your website, then your website will not be found by web users.
• Monitoring Bots: These are another kind of good bots. Let’s understand what makes them good. Monitoring bots crawl your website and make you aware of several issues so that you can work to improve your website and enhance its efficiency. This allows you to make your site perform better.
• Copyright Bots: The Internet is the ocean of all kinds of data. There are countless websites and web pages, and it is not possible to access and check them manually. Copyright bots are the only viable option in this case. They crawl the web to ensure that no one uses anyone’s content without their permission.

Bad Bots

For every good thing, there is also something bad. The same holds true for bots. We just discussed good bots. Now, it’s time to discuss some common types of bad bots:

• Spam Bots: As the name suggests, these bots indulge in click spamming. They can create and distribute spam messages and emails. These bots are harmful because they can trick users into revealing sensitive and personal information. So, one needs to be cautious about these.
• Scraper Bots: Scraper bots are another kind of bad bots. The reason they are bad is that they can copy your content from your website and paste it somewhere else on the web. This is copyright infringement, and it can compromise the authenticity and reputation of your brand and website.
• DDoS Bots: DDoS stands for distributed denial of service. The goal of these bots is to flood your website with fake traffic to increase its loading time so users cannot access your website properly. This results in financial losses for your online business.

Are There Any Ways To Identify Bot Traffic?

You must be thinking about whether there is anything you can do to identify bot traffic. Friends, take a sigh of relief because there are some ways that can help you identify bot traffic on your website if there is any. Let’s discuss these ways:

•  Speed Of Page Loading: When you notice a significant depreciation in the loading speed of your website, even when no changes are made to the website, then it’s a sign of bad bot traffic.
• Sources Of Traffic: Another thing that can be done to trace bot traffic on your website is to track the sources of the traffic that comes to your website. If a lot of traffic comes from a single source, then there is a very high chance that it is bot traffic.
• Verify IP Addresses: This is one of the most common things to check. You must check the IP addresses of the traffic that you get. If you are getting a lot of traffic from the same IP address, then chances are that it is non-authentic traffic.
• Older Versions Of Browsers: You must also keep an eye on the versions of the browsers your traffic is coming from. If a lot of traffic comes from an older version of browsers or old models of the devices (mobiles, laptops, etc.), then it is likely to be bot traffic.
• Tools: Finally, there are some tools that can help you detect bot traffic. These tools are pretty effective in detecting fake traffic.

How Does Bot Traffic Affect Your Website?

Bot traffic can affect your website’s data and content. They can alter the analytics by falsely increasing the number of page views and the number of users that visit your website. Bot traffic can also show false information regarding the IP addresses and locations of the users, thus interfering with your conversions. Ultimately, all these things will result in stigmatizing your business’ reputation.

Strategies To Stop Bot Traffic

Effective Bot Management

An effective bot management system can be used to differentiate between humans and bots through several techniques. Some of the best techniques are:

• Behavioral analysis can show the difference between the behaviors shown by bots and human beings when they navigate your website.
• Device fingerprinting can be used to collect IP addresses, and IP addresses showing weirdly high traffic could be blocked.
• Machine learning algorithms can be used to predict a bot’s behavior.

Several other techniques can also be used to differentiate between the behavioral patterns of a bot and a human being.

Use CAPTCHA Challenges

CAPTCHA challenges, such as arranging a puzzle or choosing a particular kind of image from a given set of images, can also be used to prevent bot activity on your site.

Limited Actions

Another effective technique that can be used for preventing or reducing bot activity on your website is putting a limit on the number of times a particular action can be done. This is a pretty effective way of differentiating between human behavior and bot behavior.

Educate On Bot Traffic

You should educate the people who work for you about bot traffic and how it can be harmful to your online business. They must also be taught to deal with it effectively.

Keep Yourself Aware Of The Bot Traffic Trends

This is also an important point. You must keep yourself aware of what is going on around you. You must stay updated about the bot traffic trends so that you can make decisions according to them for the security of your website.

Use Good Advertising Networks

The market is flooded with ad networks. It totally depends upon you to do proper research on several ad networks and then choose the one that meets all of your requirements. There are several ad networks that are genuine and provide authentic traffic. Some popular examples are 7Search PPC and Google Ads.

Conclusion

In the end, we just want to say that if there are positives to using technology, then there are negatives as well. Digital ad fraud, i.e., bot traffic, is perhaps one of the biggest negatives of technology. Bad bots can steal your site’s data, But there are good bots as well that help index your content and prevent copyrights. To prevent your website from bot traffic, just follow the strategies that we shared today in this blog.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is meant by bot traffic?

Ans. Bot traffic can be defined as traffic that is not authentic and is generated by automated software.

Why are bad bots harmful to a business?

Ans. Bad bots are a big threat to the growth of a business because they create an illusion of the actual traffic, even though the traffic is not real. They can steal your website’s content and trick you into revealing sensitive and private information.

What are the two most effective ways to identify bot traffic?

Ans. The two most effective ways to identify bot traffic are frequent checking of the loading speed of your website and the sources of the location of your traffic.

What is a CAPTCHA challenge?

Ans. A CAPTCHA challenge can be completing a puzzle, choosing a correct image from a set of images, or something else that can be used to detect bot activity.

What are some of the most popular ad networks that connect the business with a completely authentic audience?

Ans. Some of the most popular examples of ad networks that connect a business with a completely genuine audience are 7Search PPC and Google Ads.