One of the most common issues for modern marketers is ad fraud. Ad fraud can greatly hurt the overall reputation of your brand and waste your hard-earned money. Thankfully, there are a few things that you can do to help reduce the risk of accidental ad fraud.
What is ad fraud?
By creating fake traffic, fake installs, fake audiences, or other fake metrics, fraudulent ad publishers are able to charge marketers for ads that never took place or were never successful. For example, they can “show” your ad in a 1×1 pixel that nobody is actually able to see (but you get the impressions) or insert “replacement ads” hijacking your paid ad spot on a website and generating revenue for the hijacker instead.
Unfortunately, the number of techniques for ad fraud only grows as digital marketing technology evolves. However, there are a few things you can do to try and protect yourself and your hard-earned ad money.
Here are three useful ways that you can reduce the risk of ad fraud negatively affecting your brand:
Closely Monitor All of Your Campaigns
A large amount of mobile ad fraud is done through attribution manipulation. Perhaps the best way to understand if you’ve become a victim of ad fraud is to take the time to closely monitor all of your ad campaigns, as well as discuss all possible options with your attribution solution. Additionally, it’s also a good idea to know when it’s worthwhile to block.
Know All of Your Metrics
This is perhaps one of the most important steps in helping to identify ad fraud. Without identifying the actual issue, you won’t be able to successfully fight it. For instance, if you find that your overall PPC volume has increased by 1,000% and your CTR has tripled, yet your call volume has remained flat, this is a sign that there could be a big problem.
Utilize Reverse IP Lookup
Utilizing reverse IP lookup is an option that can be extremely effective when it comes to identifying those responsible for ad fraud. Many businesses have static IP addresses that can be easily identified. These types of lookup tools can be used to produce reports, and once they are identified, they can remove all of the bad IP addresses.
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