Low Revenue Event Conversion (and Low in-app Engagement)

The roadmap for a successful ad campaign follows these steps; deciding a strategy for marketing (Ex: Influencer, social media, paid user acquisition, etc.), finding an ad network and publishing your ad via them, checking out the stats of your ad, and CPI data to see whether if it was a success. Naturally, profit comes after that, but something might still go wrong here. Many people are downloading your app and making enough interactions to call this ad campaign a success; however, there is no in-app transaction increase even after the targeted audience is reached. This indicates that your mobile app ad campaign might be victimized by ad fraud.

-Fake Installs

The term itself explains it all; a real person is involuntarily using your mobile app, or there might be no person involved at all. The first means there might be an SDK Spoofing fraud happening concerted by your ad provider. The ad provider takes an app and modifies it to take control of an unsuspecting person’s phone and makes the necessary clicks in your app to fulfill your ad campaign requirements. However, this happens so subtle that it is pretty hard for a person to find out if something fishy is going on among the mobile apps. Besides using the conversion rates to understand that something malicious is going on, the only thing to do here is to check the involvement data and timings of the involvements. If the timings of the clicks and involvements seem unnaturally synchronized, you should check into it. We will briefly explain the no-person involvement fraud, but first, let’s see the importance of conversion rates.

-Why Everyone Should Watch Their Conversion Rates
The steps noted above are part of the roadmap all advertisers follow, but the ultimate goal is to have a high conversion rate (CVR) in ad campaigns. The CVR is what you designate for success; it might be a sale made in the app or just a click, but it is generally a download. If the ad is seen by 3000 people and downloaded by 30 people, it means your ad’s conversion rate is 1%. It is good to have this statistic high, but mobile ad fraud might be waiting around the corner if it gets suspiciously high. For
For example, in Apple’s app store, the average impression to install conversion rate is around 3.6%, and any value closer or surpassing this is considered quite good (Source:businessofapps).

-Low Revenue Event Conversion
The CVRs of your ad campaign are good, in fact, better than ever, but the CVR count does not match the expected income. Your ad might be targeted to the wrong people from an innocent approach, or the ad itself could be misleading. But actually, it might mean other things, such as the ad provider publishing your ad so that the clicks are produced automatically and excessively during the impression phase. Bots might cause the cause behind that, bot farms or emulators, and this issue is
highly toxic for both your ad budget and your accumulated data about the ad campaign.

-Bots, Farms and Emulators

When you give your mobile app in the hands of an advertisement network, it is expected that your mobile ad will be shown to the relevant customers. However, the fate of your app might end up not in the hands of humans. Bots or their organized form, bot farms can be used just to get impressions or can even be programmed to download the mobile app and imitate human behavior. Emulators are like farms, but instead of using surrogate mobile phones (which sometimes rely on complex, unjust labor force to click spam, thus causing overflowing click ratio), they operate from computers. They can emulate up to 1-30 billion ads per minute (Source: Forbes). This harrowing performance can cause significant damage to your ad budget. On a side note, instead of using your app, these bots, farms, and emulators, paid by your competitors, can create massive impressions for your published ads and force your ad campaign to end prematurely while swiftly draining your ad budget.

-Final Words
Separating itself from other types of ad fraud, these mobile ad frauds need careful planning and progression from the fraudsters’ point of view, and this creates a bit of an issue for advertisers to see through their tactics. As always, being mindful of the advertisement data and knowing the average conversion rates of similar campaigns might save you. No matter how complex the tactics of fraudsters might be, knowing the field better than them evens it. Suppose you have second thoughts about your conversion rates not corresponding to your estimations, or you want to be sure about the elimination of mobile ad fraud and fake conversions. In that case, you can get professional evaluations and sector-experienced help from Interceptd with peace in mind.