Log #025 | How to beat ad fraud

Ad fraud is a $100B+ problem that keeps growing every year. It’s estimated to represent 22% of all spend. Let’s let that sink in. It’s a massive drain of resources and disproportionately affects the Marketing poor that don’t have always have the tools to fight it.

There's also a reason ad fraud is huge on digital marketing. It's:

The ultimate gold mine for digital thieves. But, like any other type of fraud, the first step is to understand what it is and then take the right steps to get rid of it. If you don’t, it just keeps growing and growing.

Ad fraud simply is any attempt to deceive advertisers into paying for something that has no value. Here are a couple examples:

It’s across the entire funnel, but each type has it’s own nuance. 

Impression fraud is when an advertiser takes credit for showing your ad without there being actual human eyeballs seeing them. This commonly happens in display and social channels.

Example 1: Ads are shown to non-humans (bots)

Example 2: Places where humans can't see them (like below the fold).

Example 3: The classic impression fraud example is "stacking." Imagine a website with 10 ads all stacked on top of each other. You can only see the top one, but all 10 register impressions. FRAUD!

Click fraud is when you pay for a click without there being an actual intention to see the next step. This commonly happens in CPC channels like Search

Example 1: Your competitor sits in a room clicking on your ads repeatedly to drain your budget. Damn, you must have really pissed off the competition.

Example 2: More commonly it’s when bots click on your ads automatically.

Although it’s not necessarily always fraud, but this happens a lot with web crawlers. I’ve seen examples of Google and Amazon generating hundreds of clicks at consistent times when their spiders crawl the web.

Now, I can already hear a voice at the back saying, "We don't pay per click; we pay per conversion." You ain’t special because it’s happening to you too.