What is Ad Fraud?
Ad Fraud is the practice of driving impressions that will never be seen by a real person.
Fraudulent publishers and some networks use bots and other tactics to get paid on clicks that never happened, or ads served that were not viewable.
For example, a website could use bots to automatically refresh its pages to record a high number of page views and look more appealing as an inventory source for ad exchanges.
There are different kinds of fraud in RTB:
Impression Fraud: This occurs when hackers create fake websites to sell ad space on them, or when impressions from sites with large amounts of traffic are redirected through fake content sites.
Click Fraud: The most common ad fraud that occurs in pay per click online advertising is when clicks are generated from humans or non-humans (bots) that have no intention of interacting with the advertisers creative.
Banner Fraud: Another very common form of ad fraud,this is when the impressions bought don’t match to the impressions viewed by users. This can happen when banner ads are placed in 1×1 pixels or in places that are not visible to users, such as behind other ads.
Conversion Fraud: This occurs when a conversion is assigned from a human or non human source with malicious intentions.
How to prevent Fraud
Bucksense provides several tools and strategies to prevent and protect your ads from ad fraud.
Some tactics include:
- Checking traffic sources and only working with platform partners who source traffic from reputable ad exchanges and publishers
- Setting up predefined safe IPs, validated by the advertiser’s tracking provider. See more here
- Creating blacklists/whitelists. As your campaign progresses, you can build a list of publishers that you want or don’t want to target based on your results and the quality of traffic they bring. See how to create lists here
- Setting up Frequency Capping to limit the amount of impressions for a unique user, within a specific time range and the minimum amount of time between each impression. See more about this advanced targeting feature here
- Checking the data in the Click & Conversion Report to see if your campaigns settings and targeting (eg location, device, remote address etc) are running as expected, or if anything looks suspicious