According to recent industry reports, impression fraud alone is expected to cost businesses more than $45 billion worldwide by 2025, making it one of the most serious concerns in digital advertising platforms. There’s a risk of losing significant chunks of their budgets to phantom ad views and impressions that are never seen by real users.
Moreover, the increasing complexity of impression fraud makes it difficult for brands to rely on existing detection methods. This raises the bar for advertisers, who must implement more advanced solutions to address these developing risks.
Let’s see how impression fraud works and possible solutions and tools that can be incorporated to detect and mitigate it.
What is impression fraud and how does it work?
Impression fraud is a scam in which fraudsters set up false websites and join ad networks to display video and banner adverts. They use bots and automated software to artificially boost the number of publisher page visits thereby ads, giving the impression that many people are viewing the advertising even though no real users are visiting it. This not only causes wastage in marketing budgets but also spoils the ROI of the campaign.
Techniques used to boost impression wastages and cause ad fraud
Here are some of the deceptive practices that cause ad spend wastage with fraudulent or invalid impressions:
1. MFA (Made of Advertising) Sites –
MFA websites are now a major source of siphoning off your impressions. Sites built on deceptive methods rely on accidental clicks, resulting in a high bounce rate, less time spent on ads, and no action. This creates artificial engagement metrics. As a result, when engaging with publishers, marketers must confirm if the ad traffic and impressions originate from an MFA site or a legitimate validated ad placement.
2. Frequency Cap Violations –
Showing an ad to the same users often is an obvious abuse of the ad impression count restrictions imposed by advertisers. It reduces the effectiveness of the branding campaign while also wasting the ad expenditure. Advertisers must check frequency violations to preserve their ad spend and increase ROAS.
3. Ad stacking –
This refers to the arrangement of multiple adverts on a single ad placement. This caused advertisers to overestimate their reach, affecting the campaign with inflated figures. The clicks could be from legitimate users who aren’t interested in your advertisement. This kind of fraudulent placement calls into question the impression integrity of advertising efforts.
4. Pixel stuffing –
It is the practice of putting ad pixels into invisible or microscopic ad spots to generate impressions without genuine user activity. This compromises the authenticity and integrity of their campaign data, and advertisers end up paying for impressions generated by undesirable user behaviour.
The impact on Business across digital platforms
Various impacts can be seen on the business as they use digital advertising platforms:
Affect Ad campaign efficiency metrics:
These invalid impressions have an adverse impact on real human brand visibility or customer engagement. The ad never reaches its intended real human audience, and the traffic sources that give such traffic are low-quality and provide little benefit.
Invalid Impressions can render an ad campaign ineffective:
That causes trust erosion and harms your brand’s reputation. In programmatic advertising, ads display alongside invalid or irrelevant content.
Fraudulent publishers waste ad budgets:
By pushing their inventories in programmatic advertising using strategies such as domain spoofing and AI content to create a website to host advertisements. These inventories generate traffic, but they generate low-quality impressions, and Ad expenditure is wasted.
Brand Damage:
Invalid impressions render the ad campaign useless, eroding trust Ad damaging your brand’s reputation. In programmatic advertising, adverts that display dangerous content can hurt the company’s reputation and cause people to lose trust in the brand.
Best Ad Fraud Tool Features to protect from fraudulent impressions
Advertisers need to be alert and attentive before it’s too late. The best tools will have the following features for impression bot detection and impression bot protection:
AI-ML algorithms aid:
The detection of patterns, abnormalities, and fraudulent conduct by evaluating large amounts of data that is manually impossible to process and identifying invalid traffic such as impression bot protection and suspicious impression behaviours across different ad campaigns.
Real-Time:
allows advertisers to mitigate risks before substantial damage, tool like mFilterIt allows brands to block malicious traffic, invalid clicks, and fraudulent impressions and adjust the campaigns proactively ensuring maximum ROI.
Post bid impression:
This analysis means evaluating ad impressions after the bidding process is completed. It enables brands to determine whether the impressions they paid for are authentic and visible and contribute to their campaign objectives. Post-bid analysis of mFilterIt evaluates IVT, non-human interaction, and phony views. Brands can secularly evaluate their campaign outcomes.
Fraudulent Impression:
Blocking it across platforms before they counted, preventing marketers from paying for invalid traffic. Whether the advertising is appearing on mobile, OTT, or another platform, the mFilterIt tool protects them against multi-platform ad fraud.
By incorporating tools like mFilterIt into their ad campaigns, significantly reducing the exposure to impression fraud. This ensures better performance metrics and impression fraud detection, improved return on investments, and ultimately, more effective ad spending.
