How to Identify Mobile Ad Fraud?
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Advertising a digital product online has many detailed dynamics hidden from plain sight, and unfortunately, these dynamics may expose your ad campaign to shady fraudsters. However, with some direction on where to look and what to ask from the data, this issue can be corrected even though Ad Fraud targets you.
Due to its common utilization, the last-click attribution model takes the most significant slice against other preventive measures such as influencer reporting and multi-touch attribution. But, as with all Ad Fraud prevention models, Last-click attribution may not produce secure and trustful results, even though it seems so.
-Strategy to Prevent Mobile Ad Fraud
In Last-Click attribution, the “last click” means success for both you and your advertiser. However, we cannot determine whether a human makes this last click just from that data. Your advertiser might be draining your budget with click fraud. Here, we gave some insights on how you can determine if your campaign is under attack, whether it be Click Spam, Click Injection, or Fake Installs.
These types of Ad Fraud, even though how complex their mechanics are to investigate, leave some traces and clues buried in the Ad Statistics. So, a close check on those discrepancies is the first thing to do.
-Regular Stress Tests
From the statistical details collected by attribution providers, the anomalies in user behavior and device sensors might help you to find if your mobile ad campaign is genuine under the hood. Cross-checking the statistics might show you which data are from healthy targets and differentiate them from the fraudulent ones.
Another thing to underline here is the size of the control data. With regular stress tests, your database of healthy accounts will rise, and their data will be easier to distinguish from the others. As a result, identifying a mobile ad fraud will also be more manageable.
-Data Tracking
Things get complicated here as the fraud you might be experiencing might not surface at first look. Extreme statistical spikes in desertion or conversion rates might result from mobile ad fraud. Here, data tracking and backlogging of the performance data come to the rescue. Flagging fraudulent online advertisers is vital never to make the same mistakes, thus saving time and money.
-Be Conscientious of Your Audience Reach
Setting the right goals for your app is the key to success, and being specific about these goals helps your app align the focus to the shortest path of success.
Another thing to note is qualified leads. They are customers who are just inside your focus zone and are inclined to make a purchase. If your ad campaign is not filled with fake or non-qualified leads, your campaign will thrive and be successful; otherwise, your advertisement budget bleeds until it’s too late.
Also, be aware of where your advertisement is published. Low-quality websites are often connected with bots and automatic adverts with an out-of-reach audience and many other types of ad fraud. Statistical data about these websites might seem okay at first, but conversion rates will show the answer.
-Prevention Tools
If you are baffled by how clicks and impressions from your ad campaign are going through the roof while install and engagement counts are constantly at poor numbers, your campaign might be contaminated by some Ad Fraud.
To find out if this is an Ad Fraud, a meticulous data analysis along with a cross-check of in-app clicks after install is needed. However, this takes a lot of time and effort if done manually.
According to the results and their severity, you can strategize how and when to mitigate the fraud in question.
-Protect Your Ad Budget from Mobile Ad Fraud
As your campaign reaches more and more people, susceptibility to ad fraud also increases. The more non-organic interaction you get, the more ad fraud pollutes your statistics and makes your ad campaign bleed resources on fake targets.
These illegal practices from your advertisement resources should be avoided as less money lost on one campaign means more successful campaigns later. Yielding after experiencing an Ad Fraud should be out of the question as your mobile app needs to reach its target audience to succeed. Taking the measures before is the key to a non-shakable foundation.
-Final Words
In retrospect to these indicators and their respective outcomes, it is necessary to be aware if you are a victim of Mobile Ad Fraud. Managing statistical analytics for fraud prevention on your own is not the best practice and may also cause misreading as some of the mobile ad frauds are pretty complex to pinpoint with a naked eye. Thankfully, Interceptd is here to provide solutions in a timely and budget-friendly manner. Its ease-of-use interface and protective features such as automated optimizations, rule-based traffic verification, deduction automation and advanced reporting, Interceptd delivers the widest selection of fraud alarms based on deterministic and probabilistic data analysis.
