Ad Fraud Made Easy to Understand, Even If It Still is An Unpleasant Topic

I enjoy putting together little digital education pieces, and hope you find them useful. In my view, our industry can be so insular that we forget that not everyone has time or inclination to study every digital topic on 9 different levels. Marketing generalists especially are inundated with info, and so I thought that simplifying some of these hot topics might be useful for some.

Anyway, today’s topic is ad fraud!

What is Ad Fraud?

Ad fraud is the practice of deliberately attempting to drive ad impressions that have no potential of being seen by a real person. Ad Fraud is a crime – it is deliberate, premeditated, and designed to rob advertisers of value for their advertising spend.

Much ad fraud is driven by bots – software designed to automate repetitive tasks online. Of course, not all bots are bad. Not by a longshot. Search engines, for example, uses bots to examine millions of pages and apps every day to understand what content they offer. They use this information so they can deliver the best possible results with their search engines.

Such bots are obviously not malicious. They are not designed to defraud advertisers, though it is possible that a search engine bot can trigger an ad impression while doing its job.

Bot-driven ad fraud is different. These bots are deliberately developed to load ad views so that the criminal entity earns advertising dollars.

Net net, impressions delivered to bots are not necessarily ad fraud. It is the malicious intent that makes some of them fraudulent. Non-malicious bot impressions are better addressed under the topic of viewability.

Some Examples of How Fraud is Perpetrated

There are a multitude of ad fraud tactics – here are just a couple of examples:

1.    Bots that secretly take over consumer PCs and spawn page views unseen by the user.

2.     Networks of hijacked computers (“botnets”) that fake consumer traffic. Virtual machines that mimic consumer PCs and rapidly spawn thousands of page views.

3.    Videos that automatically play but which are extremely small or even invisible on the page.

4.    Software that emulates multiple clicks every time a consumer makes a real click

Ad fraud, and the fight against it, is a continuing arms race, with each protection breakthrough spawning a new approach to perpetrating fraud.

How Prevalent is Ad Fraud

All researchers who have studied ad fraud have identified it as a significant amount of total web traffic. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA and online fraud detection firm, White Ops, conducted one of the largest industry studies, in which they found that 11% of display and 23% of video impressions were caused by bots and botnets. Another leading industry association, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), stated that almost 36% of web traffic was fake.

Detecting and Preventing Ad Fraud

The best defense against ad fraud is information combined with tools to take action in intelligent ways.

On the PC web, media companies are using strategies to identify bots by, for example, treating thousands of impressions in a short period from a PC or group of PCs as suspect. Non-human activity often “looks” different when analysts examine it closely.

In the app world, where my company Apsalar plays, we help clients identify and combat ad fraud through a variety of methods. One of the most important is by helping clients identify vendors that drive app installs that don’t later lead to app loads and in-app purchases.

While not every app legitimately downloaded is later used, vendors with a high incidence of fraudulent activity drive much higher proportions of nonproductive downloads. So much app media is purchased on a cost per install basis, so this is important insight.

When clients are empowered to see which vendors and users are real people and which are likely fraudulent, our industry does better. When brands don’t have data or partners to help defend their investments against fraud, the risk is significantly higher. Apsalar is constantly developing new ways to detect and prevent fraud. For more information on our approaches and the larger issue of fraud, get in touch with us.

And you can download a PDF of this content, as well as marketing basics topics, in our “Take 5″ section of the Apsalar website. The idea of Take 5 is to create short papers that explain a seemingly complex digital topic – in less than 5 minutes of reading. Hope you like ‘em!

A Primer on Android Advertising ID

Since yesterday’s post, an introduction to IDFA, generated so much interest, we’ll continue the education theme this week by providing an introduction to Android Advertising ID.

Android Advertising ID is a device identifier for advertisers to use in anonymously understanding user activity on Android devices. An Android Advertising ID is somewhat analogous to an advertising cookie, in that it enables an advertiser to understand that a user of a particular phone has taken an action, like a click or an app install. Android Advertising IDs take the place of cookies in mobile advertising delivered to Android devices because cookies are problematic in the mobile world. For more information on why cookies don’t work in mobile, refer to our “Take 5″ eguide entitled, Why Do They Say Cookies Don’t Work in Mobile?

Advertisers want to be able to associate advertising actions to specific, anonymized individuals. Android Advertising IDs (and their iPhone siblings, IDFAs) help an advertiser identify the specific phone where the ad action takes place. Third-party cookies, which are commonly used on the PC web for tracking, tend to have short life spans – anything from 1 to 30 days on average.

By contrast, the Android Advertising ID doesn’t change unless a user decides to change it in their phone settings. Few consumers feel a need to take this action, so Android Advertising IDs can offer a better foundation for a persistent and anonymized consumer profile. Also, an advertising ID is the same for all of the apps and browsers on a phone, so it can be a powerful way to aggregate customer behavior across all of these disconnected environments. Thus, device IDs like Android Advertising ID and IDFA are very useful as the foundation for customer profiles in data management platforms, or DMPs. They enable a brand to accurately aggregate data about a customer to a specific, anonymized profile.

Before Android Advertising ID, advertisers could track actions on Android phones using a device identifier called Android ID (or ANDI.) The big advantage for the Advertiser ID over an ANDI is that it provides consumer choice. An Android ID is a permanent device number, and sharing it could not be turned off. By contrast, users have the option to opt out of Android Advertising ID tracking, or to change their ID periodically. If an app is downloaded from Google Play, it has an Android Advertising ID. If the app is downloaded from another store, tracking and measurement companies like Apsalar are permitted to track using the ANDI, but must not connect the Android Advertising ID to the ANDI.

When consumers take actions as a result of ads, like clicking a banner, playing a video, or installing an app, media companies can pass the Android Advertising ID with information about the consumer action that took place. Most media companies do pass Android Advertising IDs. Some media companies, including some large social networks, do not pass device IDs to advertisers, but do allow you to target specific IDs within their properties. Apsalar helps advertisers by associating in-app and omni-channel consumer actions to these semi-permanent identifiers. This helps them create powerful customer profiles and rich audience understanding, in addition to juxtaposing the relative performance of different media vendors. The Android Advertiser ID also enables an advertiser to individually target audiences of specific individuals that have taken actions in the past. This sort of individual targeting is becoming increasingly common as programmatic media and social media advertising grow in popularity.

You can download a PDF of this content here.

All About IDFA

One of the most common questions we’re asked at Apsalar is to explain IDFA, the advertising ID in iOS (iPhone) phones. Given that, I thought I’d put out a short and simple explanation here.

IDFA is the abbreviation for identifier for advertisers on iPhones. An IDFA is somewhat analogous to an advertising cookie, in that it enables an advertiser to understand that a user of a particular phone has taken an action like a click or an app install. IDFAs take on the tracking role for mobile that cookies play in the PC web because cookies are problematic in the mobile world. For more information on why cookies don’t work in mobile, download Why Do They Say Cookies Don’t Work in Mobile? from the resources section on our site.

Semi-Persistent Device Identifiers

Advertisers are naturally interested in understanding the anonymized individuals that take advertising actions. IDFAs (and their Android siblings, Android Advertising IDs) help an advertiser identify the specific phone where the ad action takes place.

Third party cookies, which are commonly used on the PC web for tracking, tend to have short life spans – anything from 1 to 30 days on average. By contrast, the IDFA doesn’t change unless a user decides to change it in their phone settings. Few consumers feel a need to take this action, so IDFAs can offer a better foundation for a persistent and anonymized consumer profile.

Also, an IDFA device advertising ID is the same for all of the apps and browsers on a phone, so it can be a powerful way to aggregate customer behavior across all of these disconnected environments. Thus, device IDs like IDFA are very useful as the foundation for customer profiles in data management platforms, or DMPs. They enable a brand to accurately aggregate data about a customer to a specific, anonymized profile.

UDID and IDFA

Before IDFA, advertisers could track actions on iPhones using a device identifier called UDID or universal device ID. The big advantage that IDFA offers over UDID is consumer choice. Apple introduced IDFA to offer consumers a choice when it came to interest advertising and tracking. A UDID was a permanent device number, and sharing it could not be turned off, whereas users have the option to opt out of IDFA tracking, or to change their IDFA periodically.

IDFA is the only ID that Apple allows advertisers to use to understand the advertising actions on its phones. This reflects their commitment to the ideas of privacy and choice, while also enabling a robust advertising industry in which brands target likely responders and drive revenue for app and mobile web publishers.

Using IDFA

When consumers take actions as a result of ads, like clicking a banner, playing a video, or installing an app, media companies can pass the IDFA with information about the consumer action that took place as a result of the advertising. The IDFA enables an advertiser to individually target specific individuals that have taken actions in the past. This sort of individual targeting is becoming increasingly common as programmatic media and social media advertising grow in popularity.

IDFV

You may also occasionally hear about an ID called IDFV, This stands for Identifier for Vendors. An IDFV is assigned and shared by all apps from the same company. Sometimes companies with multiple apps base their marketing efforts and analyses on IDFV, because they only change if a user uninstalls all apps from a particular vendor.

You can find more specifics about IDFA here and here.

First-(Party) Things First

Today’s eMarketer article on data shows that marketers are increasingly convinced of the importance and efficacy of first-party data as a driver of improved marketing performance. That’s great news because it shows that the market is fast coming to appreciate how important customer signals are for the future of marketing.

There are many types of information that companies can collect about their customers. Here are a number of examples:

• Website registration data
• Past online purchase information for customers
• Past in-store purchase information that can be traced to a specific individual, using a credit card record, cheque, registration form or loyalty card/program
• PC web browsing and behavior data
• Mobile web browsing and behavior data
• In-app browsing and behavior data
• Email CRM program email addresses and records of email interactions (opens, clicks, send to a friend, etc.)
• Customer interactions with your social media presences
• Call center records

It’s easy to see how, collectively, these varied sources of data can provide a foundation for understanding individual customer behavior or aggregated audience characteristics.

Taking ownership of a brand’s first-party data is an absolutely critical task for today’s marketer. It is only through collecting and interpreting this information that a brand can take a truly customer-first approach to its customer engagement efforts. And study after study show that there is no better predictor of future customer actions than past customer actions.

One of the most exciting aspects of a first-party data strategy is that it helps right-size the role that surrogate marketing metrics like demographics play in a brand’s targeting efforts. For decades, marketers have used demographics like age and gender and family status as primary drivers of media and other targeting. And demos were very powerful. But while demographics can and probably should play a role in marketing in future years, it’s important to recognize that they are simply tools to focus dollars on groups that seem to have a higher propensity than average to buy a product. Now that we can understand the actions and characteristics of each buyer, we can take a more reasoned and individualized approach to marketing communications in which demographics like age and gender play some role, though perhaps not the primary role.