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1. “I know about ad fraud. But the ANA tells me that their initiatives have it well under control and that you’re fear-mongering to get more consulting business for yourself. Is that true?”
Which part? — that ad fraud is well under control? or that I’m fear-mongering?
Yes. It’s true that I make a living from doing consulting. I have been doing digital strategy consulting for most of the last 25 years, as a small business owner. I currently do consulting for clients, teaching them how to look for ad fraud in their own campaigns and mitigate it themselves. I’m not a fraud detection tech company, but I did build a toolset for myself, to gather data about digital ads and traffic to websites, so I had accurate analytics to use for the consulting. There was no such tool before and I don’t trust anyone else’s data, because it could be inaccurate or could have been tampered with.
But no, I’m not fear mongering and ad fraud is not “well under control.” My data shows there’s more fraud than before, and there’s more types of fraud, too. It’s not just bots and invalid traffic (IVT) which the ANA keeps referring to. If you consider only bot traffic, then of course, the simple bots that are dumb enough to be caught are in the 1% range. But the hackers that maintain the botnets are smart enough to evade detection, just like they’ve done after breaking into government systems and corporate networks; they’ve been able to stay hidden for years. And you’ve read about case after case after case of new fraud schemes being outed. Those schemes have been stealing ad dollars for years, while remaining hidden in plain sight. That’s the fraud I am talking about — it’s way more than just the invalid traffic hitting websites.
It’s not fear mongering if it’s true, just like it’s not “crying wolf” if the wolf is standing right there in front of you.
2. “So you’re telling me that your homegrown tech is better than the fraud detection tech that’s got tens of millions of dollars of VC money behind it and virtually all marketers have chosen and paid for, over yours?”
No, I’m not saying it’s better. I’m saying it’s more complete and actionable for the client. What do you get in a typical report from one of these fraud verification vendors? — a spreadsheet with an IVT percentage and a few other columns like data center bots, and breakdown between G-IVT and S-IVT, etc? What do you do with that? Does it tell you which websites and mobile apps caused the fraud? Nope. Does it take into account all the cheating things a site does to make more ad revenue, like stacking 100 ads on top of each other, sticking ads in hidden 1×1 pixel iframes, refreshing the ad slots every second, or running ads in popunder windows? Nope, But feel free to ask them. They may lie to you and say they do; but how will you know for sure? They’re all black box and don’t show you any supporting details of what they measured and how they measured it. So you won’t know if their measurement is correct or not. And you can’t take any action, like turning off those sites and apps in your campaigns. That’s the whole point; they are VC backed ad tech companies. They have to keep you in the dark so they can keep charging you. And B, T, dub — fraud detection companies rely on ad fraud to continue so they can keep making money detecting it for you.
My tools are called analytics for a reason. Marketers large and small are logging into the analytics so they can monitor their own campaigns and see the fraud for themselves. The analytics takes into account IVT — bot traffic — as well as other forms of fraud like ad stacking, pixel stuffing, popunders, etc. It also shows suboptimal things that can be improved — like ads running in the overnight hours when humans are asleep, ads shown out-of-geo, overfrequency problems, etc. The analytics are like a smoke detector; it tells the marketer where to look more closely to find fraud and also suboptimal things that can be tweaked to make the campaign run better. And the key is that the marketer can see where the fraud is coming from — which sites and apps are causing the fraud, so they can add those sites and apps to block lists and stop wasting ads and money on them. I teach clients how to use the analytics so they can do it themselves.
3. “Ok, now I get that fraud is more than just IVT and bots and you can find some more than the other major vendors. But they’re MRC accredited, and you’re not. So we can’t use your stuff.”…
