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