Why we need to talk about ad fraud…still

We’ve discussed fraud before here and here, but it’s time to dust off this topic once again. In digital advertising unfortunately fraud is almost like a sub-industry in itself. It changes, adapts and evolves just like advertising technology does. However, at Adcash we are trying to grow and adapt just like the fraudsters to make sure our traffic is clean and our clients, advertisers and publishers alike, get only the best quality in performance.

What’s happening on the fraud landscape in 2018?

Click fraud still stands out from other malicious or deceptive activities. This means automated bots that will generate large amounts of fake clicks on ads that do not come from actual human beings. These clicks have zero real value for advertisers, since there isn’t a human being seeing the ads. There is also conversion fraud, which may prove to be more difficult to capture, because oftentimes it may not be noticeable right away.

Then there’s also other kinds of fraudulent activity like ads that are stacked on top of each other or ads that are invisible to the human eye, but will still generate impressions. This means, again, that the advertiser is basically paying for nothing. There’s also website related fraud as well, for example, sites that are artificially made to look like they receive more traffic than they actually do and the advertiser ends up paying more for receiving less.

How does Adcash fraud detection work?

We take the quality of the traffic that we work with very seriously. Which is why we have a designated team working with fraud issues. In addition to that we have a number of automatic fraud detection filters in place as well. We currently have about 12 filters, but every quarter we try to come out with at least one new one. As of today we filter out around 19,6% of all the traffic that we receive, which is a very good ratio compared to general industry statistics.

Naturally, we take diligent care to keep our anti-fraud filters always up to date. The reason for such regular maintenance is, of course, the nature of the fraud business, that we mentioned already in the beginning. Fraud patterns keep evolving, but we try to catch as many different types of malicious or deceptive activity that we possibly could. We have so many filters not only to intercept the most obvious and widespread fraud, but also the more sophisticated and elaborate schemes. This is part of our ongoing process to try to separate human behaviour from bot conversions.

However, it is impossible to detect 100% of fraudulent activity and sometimes even the best filters occasionally let some bad stuff slip through the cracks. Again, this is due to the constantly evolving nature of fraud, but we aim to be at least a few steps ahead of the fraudsters. This means that we always appreciate your feedback. If you think that you’ve detected some suspicious activity, let us know and we’ll look into it right away!

We apply detection to our SSPs, too!

That’s right, we take care to clean up everything that comes through our platform. Since we allow transparent targeting across supply sources and you can also buy traffic on our platform that originates from other exchanges, we apply anti-fraud filters to that traffic as well. Consider this as an additional safeguard against being cheated and we don’t even charge anything extra for that! Our anti-fraud tools are by default always included in the package.

We’re not doing it to scare publishers, honestly

It’s actually quite the opposite. Monitoring our traffic quality closely has a very tangible benefit for our publishers as well. This means that in the grand scheme of things our ability to fight fraud successfully will be very profitable for publishers. We’ll have more advertisers open to investing more money, which will lead to higher eCPM and more trust in the relationship between advertisers and publishers.

So, like we said, if you suspect any kind of fraudulent activity in the traffic we send to you or you have any further questions about our anti-fraud activities, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!