Over the past decade, an influx of new technologies has dramatically changed the way advertisers, marketers and consumers experience the web. Most notable is the troubling vulnerability of ad fraud. The culprit that negatively impacts a consumer’s online experience and often falsifies a brand’s marketing performance, ad fraud is costly and a persistent industry issue. According to industry analyst firm Forrester, budget lost from fraudulent online ads is expected to reach $10.9 billion by 2021. The industry must be on call.
Here are steps brands can embrace to prioritize and achieve ad transparency and quality.
Leveraging Empirical Data
Before serving an ad, marketers must gain insight on target audiences. Many take a “spray and pray” approach, hoping to drive performance success. Marketers who take a more strategic approach, looking to empirical data, position their brand for greater success. Empirical data generates actionable consumer insights that drive highly successful ad placement — a luxury too many marketers fail to embrace.
Our company uses empirical data to get in-depth insights into a brand's consumer audience. This allows brands to identify which products and promotions shoppers are most likely to respond to and how their consumers will engage with different ads. Collecting insights that focus on consumer behavior allows marketers to identify issues and opportunities and also increases transparency into how consumers behave online and why. This empowers brands to better optimize their online marketing campaigns and deliver ads that appear at the right place at the right time.
Pre-Qualifying Publishers
According to AdWeek, only 14% of marketers whitelist sites, with 52% estimating that 10-50% of their marketing spend is lost to fraud. Before working with a publisher, it’s critical for marketers to pre-qualify them. Brands can successfully do this by using third-party services (such as WhiteOps or Moat), leading to improved ad placement and fraud protection. These companies specialize in creating page reports on ads, before and after they're served, to determine if the ad page is safe. This enables companies to increase their blacklisting and whitelisting.
Our company also employs a thorough publisher compliance program to monitor suspicious activity that can threaten the integrity of ad campaigns run on publisher sites. Pre-filtering sites saves on ad spend and increases customer rapport and loyalty for brands.
Demanding Transparency
As the industry looks for solutions to ad fraud, more ad buyers and sellers are engaging with private marketplaces — invite-only marketplaces where high-caliber publishers offer ad inventory to select advertisers. These sites help advertisers gain more transparency into inventory buys with less competitiveness.
Furthermore, eMarketer reported that 56% of 2017’s programmatic display spending was to be represented by programmatic direct, a technology that allows buyers to access advertiser inventory that’s direct-sold and guaranteed. These ad impressions can be bought in advance from specific publisher sites and don’t require insertion orders or paperwork. While these adoptions toward better ad buying are helpful, marketers can take transparency even further by adopting ads.txt.
Ads.txt is an Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab (IAB) program that certifies whether a buyer is purchasing from a legitimate site. Our CTO, who serves as co-chair of the IAB TechLab’s OpenRTB protocol, thinks of ad buying like purchasing a Rolex: Getting a real Rolex (not a counterfeit) means knowing where to buy and what sellers are authentic. Likewise, if a buyer is hoping to purchase inventory from a site, they should diligently research the legitimacy of the site before purchasing. Ads.txt allows ad buyers to do that. Providing this transparency eliminates unauthorized inventory sales and fraudsters attempting to make money off fake sites.
Adopting Better Campaign Optimization
When running a campaign, it’s important for marketers to have confidence that their click traffic and conversions are legitimate. Marketers must adapt a high level of transparency in click tracking. There are multiple steps that can be taken to ensure clicks aren’t leading to fraudulent impressions and traffic:
• Track your advertising campaigns. Being able to catch suspicious activity in campaigns plays a large role in creating transparency and confidence in click tracking. Marketers should pay attention to a website’s traffic volume to determine if there’s bot traffic. Legitimate human traffic doesn’t change hastily, but bot traffic can be turned on and off rapidly and direct to other sites. If a site’s bounce rate and new session rate is high but pages-per-session and session duration rates are low, it’s an indication there’s a bot issue.
• Properly count clicks. In the click-referral cycle, large amounts of redirects in a click transaction stream can lead to counting discrepancies. We ensure clicks are tracked properly by waiting for the user’s browser to fully complete a site visit or search result before counting the click. Tracking this way ensures accuracy and transparency in campaign measurements.
• Prioritize the consumer experience. A study our company conducted revealed that 63% of global consumers say online advertising needs to improve, while 35% say they’ve had a bad experience with an online ad. Sixty-one percent feel that a brand has advertised to them too frequently, and 79% say they get ads for items they’ve already purchased. These statistics are symptomatic of the many advertising technology companies optimizing campaigns for clicks.
Click optimization doesn’t give a company incentive to bot filter. An increase in bots results in poor or incorrect data, which misleads advertisers to create ad experiences that are negative for the consumer. Adtech companies that implement diluted click-tracking campaigns aren’t focused on putting the consumer experience first, which should be the most fundamental priority.
Despite the rising concerns over automation, programmatic buying continues to grow and brands are still regularly buying ads that run against anywhere from 50 to 5,000 sites, according to AdWeek. By 2019, eMarketer expects programmatic digital display ad spending to reach $45.94 billion. With all this growth, it is critical that brands care for consumers by being thoughtful and cautious in how they buy ad space.
