How to fight inventory fraud in online advertising?

Beyond just the basic façade of fraud, low-quality inventory impacts negative brand associations, perception, inaccurate viewer data, and wasted human effort are some of the things that are plaguing the digital industry gravely. While consumer-facing information technology grows and improves, providing brands/organization with exciting new ways to interact with the world, they also open avenues for fraudsters to become more sophisticated. Yet, new ways to prevent fraud are coming up with advertisers/agencies resorting to the following methods:

• In-house Antifraud Filters: Modern-age Anti-Fraud Filters considers all the abnormalities associated with UserID, Timestamp, Session time, IP, clicks, browser & a lot more parameters while checking traffic quality. This gives advertisers the capability to block any arising non-human or suspicious traffic in real-time. Having In-house viewing and fraud measurement for all display, Mobile and video advertising helps organizations flit through the potential malicious entities.

• 3rd Party verification partner: Advertisers often enlist the help of 3rd party verification partners to leverage their technology and understanding of the ecosystem. These 3rd party verification partners connect with the advertiser’s ad server/bidder through cloud end point. Due to this server to server connection, verification partners provide realtime analytics on each and every impressions to the advertiser’s bidder indicating whether to bid or not on those impressions. This is what we call as prebid filter and this prevents all uncategorized, boot & non-branded traffic in real-time before it reached the advertiser bidder where the biding starts.

• Human Audit: Agencies/adtech companies also enlist a human resource team who constantly monitors and approves all new websites that apply for an account with them. All the publishers need to go through a mandatory audit before getting on-board. The publisher is kept on pending audit status till the verification completed. Upon verification by the human domain auditing team, the impressions are sent to advertiser campaigns. Being able to better compare performance across publishers and ensures appropriate return on advertising spend while maintaining brand safety, this is a very crucial step that every advertising company must follow.

Conclusion

Although the internet will never be 100% fraud-free, constructing a safer experience for users and brands is a goal the industry as a whole can get behind. As digital ad budgets grow and more money is put into programmatic campaigns, advertising tech providers will play a role in creating a brand-safe and confidence-instilling environment for both advertisers and consumers to thrive. 

By Mr. Raja Chakraborty, Co-Founder, Streamlyn