Digital ad fraud is predicted to expense the world economy a staggering $81 billion by 2022. In other words, the $81B in advertising expenditure will favour unaffiliated third parties rather than the businesses directly.

In this post, we will go into more depth about what ad fraud is, how you can identify ad fraud and what methods you can use to safeguard your investment if you are a company owner or marketer who is concerned that fraudulent clicks or redirections will negatively impact your ad expenditure.

What Is Ad Fraud and How does it Act?

Ad fraud, commonly referred to as Invalid traffic (IVT), is selling internet advertising engagements, hits, traffic, conversions, or data unlawfully to make cash.

“Ad fraud” entails lying about how often an online advert is viewed or presented. The advertiser’s tangible outcome is as the number of clicks rises, and the publisher is compensated with an advertising charge. Competitors or dishonest publishers may engage in this kind of fraud by deploying artificial bot traffic to click on their adverts.

To attract customers, online marketers employ digital advertising. In 2022, forecasters predict marketers will spend more than $500 billion on digital advertisements. It is not shocking that scammers would want to participate with enough money on the line.

Is ad fraud illegal?

Yes, ad fraud is illegal. Using bots to make purchases from advertisers without the advertiser’s permission is considered fraud and can result in severe consequences for the perpetrators.

Ad fraud is a serious problem that can impact everyone in the digital advertising ecosystem. Fraudsters spoof high-value web pages and employ bots to simulate visitor clicks to steal funds from marketing budgets.

The Ten Common Types of Ad Fraudulent

However, from what is advertising click fraud to how SDK spoofing works, the following are some of the most common types of ad fraud:

Domain Spoofing

Domain Spoofing Fraudsters imitate a high-value site that is more lucrative and expensive by using domain spoofing. Although the customer and views are genuine, the massive investment on the subpar website is not justified. Domain spoofing techniques include:

• Scattering across Domains
• Unique browsers
• Person browsing

SDK Spoofing

SDK spoofing, related to man-in-the-middle (MitM) threats, occurs when a scammer bypasses SSL encryption to discover which URL requests correspond to in-app actions to produce fraudulent downloads.

Ad Injection

This style of online ad fraud swaps or implants fresh advertising while a user is accessing the web. On occasion, one advertisement is layered on over another. Often they completely replace them or force them to appear on sites where they weren’t designed to. When customers use a website, plugin, or application, malware is frequently delivered to them as part of the installation process.

Ad Stacking

In this variation of mobile ad fraud, con artists “conceal” adverts. Several adverts are piled on the pinnacle of one another, yet only one is displayed to viewers. The consumer won’t view the contents in this instance, even though all of the advertisements in the stacks may have legitimate engagements; thus, the advertisers won’t benefit.

Bot Fraud or Click Fraud

Click fraud attacks pay-per-click (PPC) ads and is typically carried out by bots. It deceives the advertising platform into thinking that genuine people are engaging with the content, boosting the popularity of a blog or website. Then businesses invest extra money to display advertisements on the platform, but they are financing the scammers.

This may seem an issue to publishers who make advertising revenue because they are already being paid. But if advertisers learn, they might opt to stop running their advertising.

Pixel Stuffing

By serving many ads in a single pixel chassis, con artists that use pixel stuffing hide the adverts from readers. The advertiser receives no benefit from the advertising despite if they are delivered because the consumers don’t necessarily notice them.

Geo Masking or Location Fraud

Bringing the correct material to the targeted people is a key component of using ad networks. This entails achieving a target geographical region for many advertisers. Scam artists use geo masking to convey bogus location information so that the advertisement is served to people outside the target audience.

Forced Redirects

By putting a fraudulent ad or iframe on a website, malicious people can use internet advertising fraud to distribute malware in addition to embezzling cash. This attempts to steal their personally identifying information by rerouting them to a different website that has adware or viruses.

Cookie Stuffing

A type of impression and CPA (cost per action) attributing fraud is cookie stuffing. This imitates a click-spamming tactic. The browser of a real user will be overflowing with cookies. As cookies are ubiquitous, the consumer or browser won’t likely be alarmed by this. These cookies may potentially originate from unrelated or non-advertising websites.

There is a potential that the imputation tool or MMP may incorrectly credit the paid action or organic impressions to the dishonest cookie stuffer when an organic or paid transaction or impact occurs. This is due to the constant possibility of a technical malfunction or a lack of data. If this is the case, a malicious cookie can use that flaw to acquire the attribution and get paid.

Click Flooding

This variation addresses webpages and mobile applications particularly. Whereas the user uses the third-party application ordinarily, clicks are executed in the background. Since they were never exposed to it, users are never even aware that they have engaged with in-app advertisements.

What is Ad Fraud Prevention?

How do you overcome click fraud? This is the most common query that every advertiser is in search of. Well, the following are some of the ways that entail how you can cope with ad fraud.

Look Out for Copyright Theft

Consider turning up excellent fit Google alerts or utilizing a company like Increase Rev to track sightings of your content online to make sure no one is trying to make money with content that has been lifted from your website. Send a DMCA strike notification to anyone who is abusing your copyright.

Set Up Custom Alerts

It might be challenging to identify many sorts of ad fraud simply by looking at the on-page activity. You should monitor your traffic and income figures for unexpected changes in such circumstances. Administration users can build custom alerts based on statistics like visits, landings, website traffic, etc., in most analytics solutions, notably Google Analytics.

Question Your Metrics

Question Your Metrics helps in Ad fraud prevention by providing the visibility of the ad inventory and ad serving inventory. This can be done by analyzing the data for each publisher, campaign destination, Ad group, and ad type. The data is then used to identify fraudulent activity by comparing it with normal patterns and other publisher databases like Double Click.

Question Your Metrics can be used in two ways:

• As an ad server for publishers – Question Your Metrics helps publishers understand how their inventory is performing against KPIs like CPM and CPL, as well as how their competitors are performing. This information can help them make better decisions about where to spend money on programmatic advertising.

• As a self-serve tool for clients – Clients can use Question Your Metrics to spot fraudulent traffic in their campaigns before they waste money on it. Clients can also use this tool to test different types of inventory and see what works best for them.

Join Forces with a Reliable Supplier

A specialized approach is required for a particular issue. Many ad tech companies aid publications and advertisers by monitoring traffic quality, ad efficiency and thwarting malware. These companies combine the buying and selling sides of the ad tech market. Look for a vendor who can provide the tools and prompt guidance you need to avoid ad fraud.

Obtain User Opinions

Ad injections and forced redirection are two examples of ad fraud that may be challenging for website administrators to spot but are quite obvious to visitors. Allow your users to comment on how they found your site’s pages and advertisements.

Maintain ads.txt Document

In contrast to adhering to industry standards for ads.txt maintenance, ensure you get an ads.txt file in place to expressly state the ad networks, exchangers, and SSPs who are permitted to trade your inventory. A legitimate Sellers.json file, which enables marketers to confirm the authenticity of the inventory and views they are acquiring, should also be hosted by your monetizing partners.

Explore Scripts and Plugins from Outside Sources

To run advertisements and statistics and expand the capabilities of their website, publishers must use a range of third-party CMS plugins, add-ons, and scripts. Resources provided by unreliable programmers might be used for user data collection and ad fraud. Before applying the code, keep in mind you have examined it to ensure that it is solely doing the intended functions.

How Do Ad Fraudsters Make Money?

Well, fraudsters profit a large sum of money financially. To make money as an Ad Fraudster, they need to be a sub-publisher in an ad network to accomplish this.

A sub-publisher, albeit a bad one. They deceive Matrix metalloproteinase or attributing algorithms into attributing sponsored events (installs, clicks, etc.) to the malicious sub-publisher by using a number of the proposed techniques (SDK Spoofing, click injections, etc.). Then the advertisers bid for it.

Conclusion

Ad fraud is a serious issue that impacts Advertisers across all sectors, and it doesn’t seem like it will get better anytime soon. As a result, you must just stop ignoring the problem.

Not on whether you’ve been a victim of ad fraud, but rather how. It depends on how much advertising fraud has impacted you. Because of this, spending money on ad fraud prevention is crucial.

So, why not try us? Increase Rev has proprietary technologies to eliminate fraudulent users and ad trafficking. We refer to it as “safe ads,” and it completely protects you from fraudulent clicks and impressions. Contact us now to protect your web and mobile apps from malware!