A Businessman’s Guide to Spotting and Preventing Ad Fraud

In today’s digital age, online marketing is one of the best ways to sell your products and services. However, it comes with its disadvantages as it can attract fraudsters who can use up your ad budget in undesirable ways and give your company the wrong idea of clicks and impressions. There are many ways that ad fraud can be done, which can cause the company to have to deal with losses.

What Is Ad Fraud?

Ad fraud is the practice of deceptively making it appear like ads are doing well and getting money out of campaigners without generating any real traffic on the ads. In 2022 alone, the total cost of ad fraud was 81 billion dollars. There are many types of ad fraud. Click fraud makes the process of clicking on ads automated through a script or a bot. The ad gets clicked on, but these are fake clicks, as normally, people would only click on the ad if they were genuinely interested in it. It is done to make it look like an ad campaign is performing more successfully than it is, and to drain the budget of the campaigners.

In domain spoofing, fraudsters run ads on websites that do not meet their target audience. For example, a company for luxury watches wants to run its ads on a high-end website to meet its audience, but fraudsters will run it on a clickbait site with fewer charges, so the number of required clicks is achieved, but the campaign becomes useless as it does not reach the right audience.

In impression fraud, bots create fake impressions for the ad even if it was not clicked on. Business owners get happy to see the number of high impressions, and continue to pay more for that ad, not knowing that the fraudsters are creating fake impressions to get their money. Fake impressions can be created by stuffing ads one on top of each other so that there are many ads in only one placement, but only the top ad is visible to the user, and impressions are accounted for all the ads. They can also be created by stuffing an ad in a single pixel, so it appears on the website, but is invisible to the user, and its impressions are accounted for.

How to Prevent Ad Fraud

In order to keep your campaigns safe, you should invest in some ad-detection software or solutions like Anura, which can allow you to have ad-fraud-free campaigning. Such solutions can detect all types of fraud, like malware, fake clicks, and impressions, and can get rid of bots. In this way, you can get real insight from the data you have, as the clicks and impressions would be genuine rather than achieved in a fake and deceptive manner.

You should also constantly monitor your ad analytics for any suspicious activity, such as an unusual spike in traffic, which is probably a result of bot activity. You should also investigate if you are getting traffic from areas that you have not targeted because that probably means your ads are being run on clickbait sites to generate clicks and impressions.

How Ad Fraud is Bad for Your Business

Fraudulent clicks make businesses assume that their ads are doing well and end up spending more money to continue the campaign as the fake data confuses them, and instead of benefiting them, spending on ads brings them a lot of loss of both money and other resources like time and energy.  It reduces return on investment and makes future campaigns much harder.

Ad fraud can also ruin the reputation of your business as customers can come across ads that are of bad quality, stacked on top of each other, or crammed into a minimal number of pixels, and come across harmful or inappropriate ads that make customers uncomfortable, and they lose credibility in your business.

Conclusion

Even though digital marketing is one of the best ways to run your campaigns and market your products and services, it also comes with the big risk of fraudulent advertisements, which is why you should stay informed about the latest tools and technologies to detect ad fraud, always monitor your analytics, and take precautionary measures that ensure your budget is not going to be wasted.