Digital Advertising will most likely be the top media advertising expenditure in 2016 according to comScore. That's also making it an irresistible target for click fraud. In fact, according to a new report on fraud in the online advertising industry, one-third of all advertising expenditures will be wasted on fraud.
Distil Networks and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have released A Digital Publisher's Guide to Measuring and Mitigating Bot Traffic, a report that examines today's digital ad fraud problem.
Key Click Fraud Findings
- 75% of publishers and 59% advertisers are unable to decipher human versus non-human traffic.
- Skewed analytics (50%) and lead fraud and fake registrations (32%) are also important non-human traffic problems to both publishers and advertisers.
- Click and impression fraud are the top concerns for both publishers (86%) and advertisers (100%) when it came to web traffic issues.
The report is incredibly in-depth and walks publishers and advertisers through how click fraud works as well as strategies to mitigate the risk, including:
- Performance – Focus less on raw numbers and more on observable actions. Incorporate incentivized performance metrics for your agency to ensure quality business results.
- Ignore Views – Viewability is easily faked by bots and other non-human traffic.
- Quality – Budget for quality, not quantity. Allocate money away from long-tail sites in ad exchanges, where fraud is more prevalentand buy inventory on mainstream, premium sites.
- Demand Transparency – If the your agency or ad inventory suppliers can't show you where each ad
impression was served, don't use them.
Download A Digital Publisher's Guide to Measuring and Mitigating Bot Traffic
Hi Douglas- the article covers fine the click fraud subject, but it does not offer a real solution, as click fraud might not be always subjected to bot traffic. An idea would be to be very careful with the settings related to geo targeting (like the ones under +Advanced options). Also, using dedicated software, like http://www.xionagrup.ro would be a great ideea, or even using log parsers to see what IPs or classes are clicking on your ads.