Why Ad Fraud Prevention Could Be Your Best Marketing Investment In 2022

As the dust of concerns caused by the global-scale pandemic is slowly lifted by governing bodies around the world, mobile-focused digital advertising has risen to the top in the sector. This swift emergence was expected of course but the implications and seriousness of ad fraud also rising on the back of digital marketing has always been left in the background and lack of action made it a threat for every ad campaign even though numerous projections are made by us and other mediums.

“As a direct threat to their online campaigns, 40 percent media experts chose ad fraud, 39 percent chose fake news and misinformation, while 26 percent chose data privacy legislation” Brand Equity, 2022

What is Ad Fraud?

Ad fraud is the culmination of various illegal activities conducted by fraudsters to make unlawful profits while misguiding and masking off the collected advertisement data, rendering the current and next ad campaigns useless and unprofitable.
The data provided by the interactions of the target audience carries such little information that it can easily be disguised by ad fraud techniques such as bot farms and click injections.
But, the sinister part of ad fraud comes not only from the losses of the current ad campaign but the masquerading nature of it. Not knowing you are a victim is the worst that could happen as ad fraud will wreak havoc on any other subsequent ad campaigns too, leaving businesses stupefied about why there is high engagement but no revenue in the long run.

A Significant Challenge in 2022

To be fair, the digital advertisement sector now knows the importance of ad fraud and a lot of industry leaders are trying to share how ad fraud trends are evolving in line with the advertisement business itself. However, this should not be a struggle and instead of becoming a victim, all companies should actively combat it by taking precautions. If only a handful of companies are fighting against it, the whole digital advertisement sector could become a lawless wildland riddled with ad fraud. So, every company advertising in the sector have a responsibility to know about preventing ad fraud.

Methods of Combating Ad Fraud

There are a lot of implications of ongoing ad fraud. Those implications lie in the data provided by the advertisement network and a closer look for any erratic value in the software is the first step in preventing ad fraud. Any values which are too good or too bad are what we should look for first. This, of course, is a start in combatting ad fraud and might take precious time or manpower but is also infinitely better than losing all the budget of an ad campaign.

As we mentioned before, the limited nature of this software makes it hard for regular people to go inside the data further but we can note some other important details, click to install times and geolocation data. If install times are taking too much or too little time, along with some patterning, it could refer to ad fraud. Taking a closer look at the geolocation data and phone IDs might also surface an ongoing fraud. These insights will provide aid in finding out about basic types of ad fraud.
However, a more successful and secure way for companies is to get professional help about this issue. Since ad fraud has also become a sector in itself due to its profitable nature to fraudsters, its trends also evolve around masking those telltale signs in the statistics and it becomes harder day by day for inexperienced people to find out about ad fraud just by rummaging through statistics. No matter the wideness of your ad campaign, it is hard to see discrepancies with the naked eye, and automated software (preferably a real-time one) is surely needed. There are also many other fraud types such as SDK spoofing which is practically impossible to find out just by looking at the software provided by ad networks.

Final Words

In line with the losses of previous years, big companies are slowly starting to understand the importance of the fight against ad fraud and share their insights on this issue. The experts also know that if a sector grows too fast, it cannot face all the problems at the same time. This seemingly endless growth of the global advertising market (projections can be seen here) also causes shortcomings and those shortcomings feed the vile beast that is ad fraud. Interceptd is here to provide industry-leading ad fraud prevention solutions to combat this issue. We are here to provide the information however we can and offer specialized real-time solutions for every case of ad fraud.