Fraud in digital advertising is a barrier to full budget utilisation and achieving your goals as a marketer. Across pay-per-slick (PPC), mobile apps and social media advertising, you could be losing budget to invalid traffic and seeing an impact on your campaign’s ROI. As you plan your digital marketing campaigns for 2023, combating fraud needs to be part of your marketing mix.
As organisations evaluate their 2022 advertising campaigns for the new year, ad fraud is being overlooked and undervalued as an issue. A lack of knowledge of the growing ad fraud landscape means budgets aren’t being optimised with ad fraud standing in the way. To enable growth, build recognition and achieve awareness in 2023, marketers need to be proactive.
Ad fraud is a subset of invalid traffic, generated with malicious intent, showing itself as having no genuine interest in the ads and resulting in a poor return on investment (ROI). With the growing digitalisation of processes comes a growing risk of ad fraud and estimations by Juniper Research predict digital ad spend lost to fraud to reach $68 billion globally in 2022, rising to $112.6 billion in 2026.
As businesses kick off their 2023 marketing plans, there is one thing that shouldn’t be overlooked: a strategy for combating ad fraud. To protect return on ad spend (ROAS), it is imperative that advertisers don’t suffer from unnecessary losses to budget, time or opportunities for engagement.
The ROI Barrier
Ad fraud is a collective term to describe a variety of tactics used to block digital ads from being delivered to genuine audiences, essentially sabotaging the advertising efforts of a business for financial gain. These tactics include bots, click spamming and cookie stuffing. Employing these methods enables fraudsters to drain a company’s ad spend, while it is oblivious to the damage that is being done to its brand exposure, leads and sales. Marketers are left questioning their low conversion rate but are at a loss without a strategy to fight against the fraudsters stealing their budgets.
Positive numbers in engagement data can easily translate to negative losses for businesses that cannot distinguish between legitimate and invalid traffic, making the battle for budget harder for marketers. To obtain budgets for advertising campaigns, marketers need to demonstrate how and why they can increase budget to put themselves ahead and show that:
Their strategies and tactics work to aid business growth
They can show results from campaigns to unlock more budget
They are equipped with the technology to execute campaigns and show their expertise
In 2021, nearly 19% of internet traffic in the marketing industry alone was attributed to non-human bots that are actively engaged in ad fraud, a report by Statista revealed. And, if this isn’t enough reason to tackle ad fraud, 2023 is calling for strategic change in response to the state of the economy.
Some industries may be better situated to thrive during an economic downturn, but any sector can
be affected by ad fraud. No matter if c-suites shift budgets to differing digital marketing strategies, the same problem remains – invalid traffic is causing losses. It is imperative that marketers identify ways to change their marketing strategies to adapt to the challenges of the new year and this starts with identifying invalid traffic and stopping it at the source.
New Year, New Solutions
2023 is going to bring a variety of challenges and opportunities for marketers and preparing for change is imminent. For marketers requiring more budget, tackling ad fraud is the answer.
The first step is for marketers to build a valuable business case where benefits, risks and costs are weighed up to identify the preferred solution. This will not only unlock more existing budget but demonstrate initiative to help generate funds that could be invested further.
Manual ad fraud detection can be extremely costly to companies that lack experience in developing strategies to tackle fraud. It also requires time to gather and process contextual data and so marketers need to evaluate the technology available to streamline this process.
Blacklists identify and block sources that match fraud patterns. Once added to a blacklist, all clicks and installs from the source are automatically blocked. This is a simpler layer of protection, as fraudsters can easily circumvent them by changing the IP addresses of their traffic. Rule-based detection and mitigation is a further method for blocking invalid traffic. It is able to define a particular fraud tactic, but it is impossible to formulate rules for fraud tactics that have never been encountered before. It is always fraud first and then the rule, which can greatly impact budget and efficiency.
Machine learning automates the extraction of known and unknown patterns from data, expressing those patterns as either a formula or instruction set that can be applied to new and evolved data. Patterns are automatically learned by the model and the insights can be much more valuable and produced faster than using human analysis alone. This provides a proactive defence that stops fraud before the fraudster is paid and the marketer is impacted.
Despite the challenges for marketers heading into 2023, advertising campaigns will continue. Simultaneously, fraudsters will only increase in sophistication and ultimately impact advertisers’ efforts to secure a return on their advertising spend. Organisations need to prioritise prevention as well as detection if they are to survive the critical risks facing marketing budgets.
Getting Ahead in 2023
It is clear that implementing an ad fraud solution is the way forward for businesses to maximise their ROAS and protect budgets. Projected to become a bigger problem in 2023, companies need to ensure they are getting the most from their advertising campaigns, generating genuine impressions and clicks that create value.
Taking control over their marketing results by finding solutions to ad fraud will open up opportunities for marketers. They can maximise campaign return on investment (ROI), and proactively monitor legitimate traffic and clicks whilst highlighting their success by showcasing authentic results. By building a business case that showcases the benefits of establishing an ad fraud protection solution, marketers can maximise the budget they have as well as lobby for more by proving their capabilities.
Ad fraud is continuously advancing, and marketers can’t afford to sit back whilst their budgets are drained from fake leads and inaccurate conversion rates. Advances in fraud protection mean there are systems out there that can learn, adapt, and uncover emerging patterns for preventing fraud – all it takes is the right partner.
TrafficGuard
Adam French, Regional Vice President (EMEA)