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Many of our compatriots are now actively trying to do business abroad, and this article can serve as a good starting point for further research on choosing means of protection abroad.
When they talk about advertising fraud, they don’t mean that they “blatantly lie and don’t blush,” but that digital technologies are used to cause harm.
This article will be interesting not only for entrepreneurs: many will probably understand why, after installing a fun app for downloading the most fashionable wallpapers, the phone began to discharge quickly, and the Internet is constantly slowing down.
Often, entrepreneurs - especially those representing small and medium-sized businesses - either do not know at all about the existence of online advertising fraud, or have only a superficial understanding of it.
We will learn about various scammers' tricks, as well as tactics to counter them, and review the best tools for detecting fraudulent advertising activities - everything to ensure that desperate efforts to promote a business (often spent on the last of your money) do not go to waste.
And if so, then it is impossible to avoid encounters with scammers. This will surprise some, but it is also becoming difficult not to become their accomplices.
Advertising fraud is not a new phenomenon. In the advertising technology industry, it is a long-standing problem that requires more and more attention year after year. The diversity of advertising tools of marketers is growing - naturally, the scale of the disaster is increasing.
This refers to the deliberate distortion or manipulation of engagement metrics in order to generate fake traffic and false ad impressions, which in turn negatively impacts true click-through rates and, therefore, profits.
Fraud with mobile app installations stands somewhat apart. It manifests itself in the most unexpected forms and is not always easy to detect.
To get their bribe, fraudsters are forced to create programs that adapt to the actions of real users and affect the flow of the normal advertising process - they fake traffic, distort the number of impressions and clicks. Of course, this is not done manually, but with the help of various automation tools, such as bots.
Most fraudulent activities involve baiting bots to click on ads. The entrepreneur who paid for the ad will pay for each such click or view in the hopes of attracting new customers.
But the customers won't come. Those who "clicked on the ad" don't need anything more than a tiny bit of electricity - they have no other needs.
Everyone benefits:
Everyone... Except for the entrepreneur who paid for this celebration of technology with his last money.
Click fraud is not the only form of advertising fraud. Therefore, it is important for everyone who is not on the dark side to have a good understanding of the peculiarities of modern mobile marketing and to understand all the techniques that are in the arsenal of attackers. It is advisable to do this before irreparable damage is done to the marketing strategy and the advertising budget is zeroed out.
Geomasking
The cost of advertising traffic depends heavily on the location of its source on the planet.
For example, the highest cost of traffic comes from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Despite this, most sellers prefer to deal with visitors from these countries because they make the most expensive purchases. Thus, investing more money in more expensive traffic really pays off because it is high-quality.
The essence of the deception here is that fraudsters sell low-quality traffic, disguising it as high-quality by replacing the true geographic location of the source. Using geomasking, fraudsters can resell one type of traffic as another at a high price.
The fraud will be revealed when the hapless entrepreneur discovers a low click conversion rate. The good thing here is that this type of fraud is determined quickly and easily. The only condition is that all business processes must be built correctly so that the discrepancy with the expected indicators is immediately noticeable.
Advertisement overlay
As the name suggests, one advertisement “hides” others underneath itself: the user will see only one advertising block – the one that is on top of all of them.
Advertisers of hidden blocks will expect their ads to be shown. Moreover, they will also pay for it.
By hiding one advertisement behind another, the fraudster collects money for all ad impressions, while the user sees only one of them.
One-pixel ad
This type of fraud is similar to "advertising overlay". The essence is the same - the technical approach is different.
Narrowing the ad unit to an extremely small size (1×1 pixel) allows you to place a lot of advertising and collect money for its display. Technically, it is sort of implemented: requests are sent, counter readings are updated. But people do not see the advertising, just as in the case of overlay.
The method can be used multiple times on one page, allowing scammers to receive multiple impressions of different ads at the same time, even if they are actually only seen by gnomes on the monitor.
Advertising hack
Here, the scammers take over the server. Not physically, of course, but they get the ability to store information on it. The real owners' access is not limited, and they may not suspect anything.
Most often, attackers replace the content of advertising blocks. In rare cases, they use this method to place advertising on sites where it is not usually shown.
Cookies
When you visit a website, small text files known as cookies are used to store information about your browsing: time, duration, behavior – you name it.
Unfortunately, fraudsters can gain access even to these text files. By changing the contents of a cookie file , it is possible, for example, to fraudulently report consumer purchases.
Scammers use this tactic to collect money they haven't earned. By downloading fake cookies into users' browsers, they directly steal commissions from legitimate affiliates.
Clickbaiting and the "evil eye"
Special software (and sometimes people) click on advertisements or view them mindlessly.
Technically, this can be done in fundamentally different ways:
With dedicated computers, everything is clear: they rent a server and run a bunch of bots on it.
Hiring protein bots instead of silicon ones is more interesting. Entire “farms” can be used for this — large enterprises where large groups of low-paid workers are hired to watch ads, click on advertising links, install applications, scroll through videos, and so on. The goal is still the same — deception and money.
Since such farms are often found in low-income countries, it is usually not difficult to identify the activity of such a farm in advertisements and applications.
Ghost in the phone
The user can click on advertisements without even suspecting it. The advertising ghost that he has hooked by installing a wallpaper or voice changer program or some other very useful "app" does it for him. Yes, the ghost can click on advertisements not alone, but in a whole company.
In essence, it's the same as with a dedicated computer or a person on a bot farm - only the devices of ordinary users are used. It is not necessary to install an infected application to become a participant (or victim) of this zombie network - it is enough to catch a "virus" in the usual way.
Here the user has no idea that his actions are not limited to what he does himself. A battery saving program or a super launcher or another extremely necessary application, which an authoritative site with jokes and half-naked celebrities advised him to install, works for him.
Buns
Such ghosts can only be active when a new mobile application is installed. By actively generating clicks, the malicious program tries to replace the one whose link the user followed to download the application in the eyes of interested parties.
It should be said that it is not always about money. It could be, for example, "credits for downloading" or some other marketing perks. When a user installs a "new application", all the "old" ones, including malicious ones, find out about it - they generate fake "clicks", attributing the download to a fraudster.
It's akin to showing up at a random stranger's front door and pretending to be their long-lost relative, hoping to be invited in for a free meal.
It is unlikely that you will be successfully accepted as a real relative, however, if you visit 40 houses every day for a month, your chances of getting a free meal increase significantly.
The most primitive malware doesn't even wait for the app to start installing: it imitates clicks en masse. Continuing with the analogy of the impudent person, this time you arrive exactly when dinner is being served. You simply sit down at the laid table and hope that the host will accidentally mistake you for a real guest and feed you.
And the one paying for the “banquet” is the smartphone user who carelessly downloaded the malware.
The purpose of Traffic Guard is to detect signs of fraud before there is a risk of damage to the budget. Such a warning system can significantly reduce financial losses.
The Traffic Guard system is integrated into the advertising process, receives and analyzes reliable information about impressions, clicks, conversions and other events - everything to detect anything wrong at the earliest stages. "A proactive strategy that helps confidently scale and optimize advertising" - this is how the creators describe themselves.
Traffic Guard was founded in 2015 and is now a division of Adveritas Limited, a company with global operations and a listing on the Australian Securities Exchange.
Leading international companies such as Rappi, GoJek, major game developer Glu Mobile, mobile advertising agency MUV, e-commerce giants Bukalapak and Centauro trust Traffic Guard specialists and solutions with the security of their advertising budgets.
Traffic Guard algorithms try to act very carefully, based on inconsistencies in statistical analysis. This is another difference from other solutions, which can often be compared to elephants in a china shop, blocking traffic sources in batches based on broad criteria.
Another important advantage is the openness and transparency of algorithms. Traffic Guard is ready to justify each incident of interaction cancellation, not only to its client, but also to advertising agencies and other interested parties.
This approach effectively protects genuine traffic and at the same time has a small number of false positives. And if you consider that all the worries associated with wasting time on sending spreadsheets, manual verification and the like disappear; consider that it becomes possible to optimize advertising campaigns in real time - it becomes difficult to overestimate the usefulness of Traffic Guard.
Key features:
Adjust is aimed at combating fraud in mobile advertising. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, in order to bite off their piece of advertising budgets, attackers use fraudulent installations, clicks, traffic, impressions on mobile applications.
Advertisers will pay for everything, but they will receive meaningless data that will not lead to a connection with real users of the application and will not allow focusing on the target audience.
Adjust offers advertisers a suite of tools that can be used to:
A comprehensive set of mobile ad fraud prevention technologies is bundled together in the Adjust Fraud Prevention Suite.
Adjust focuses on identifying signs of fraudulent activity and preventing further technical interaction (unlike most similar systems, which are designed to fight against groups of people or devices). This approach simultaneously builds reliable protection on the one hand, and on the other, does not allow the loss of real traffic and does not underestimate the number of installations.
While Adjust is used by Yelp, Spotify, SoundCloud (to name a few of the world's biggest names), it remains a product for small businesses and is ideal for them precisely because of how thorough the sifting is. That's its founding concept and remains so to this day.
Key features:
While Perform is not a direct fraud prevention solution, it does provide significant protection against it.
The company's core strategy is "pay for results," which helps brands grow their customer base through digital media.
Perform uses proprietary technologies, sophisticated algorithms (some of which are rule-based, others rely on machine learning), and proprietary tools to automatically optimize your ad campaign while detecting ad fraud.
Every professional marketer can customize the tools provided to best suit their strategy: define the target market, traffic, set additional rules and conditions. Attracting as many customers as possible becomes an achievable goal. Perform has many ways to help with this.
The prices, it must be said, are somewhat different from the options discussed above. But they are more flexible. Perform offers a complex model of payment based on the cost per action. You can pay per click, per interaction, per lead, per installation, per sale — there is no point in listing everything here. But regardless of what type of activity the entrepreneur decides to focus on, fraud protection always works.
This service has a lot to offer in terms of marketing and audience development.
Key features:
AppsFlyer offers mobile app marketers sophisticated solutions to protect against fraud with the attribution of authorship of the installation at all stages: "before", "during" and "after". The debugged multi-level protection against all forms of fraud with mobile advertising is based on machine learning, an established database, and biometric behavioral analysis.
Custom validation rules, real-time protection, reliable CPA (Cost Per Action - a model of payment for online advertising, in which only certain user actions are paid for) - this is just a part of a large list of technologies aimed at preserving the advertising budget.
Deep analysis of the relationships between individual metrics allows you to increase sales, installations, LTV (Lifetime Value). There are special functions for individual user adaptation, conversion optimization, flexible selection of the best option and deployment of all necessary tools.
A free 30-day trial period is given (basic features). Tariff plans are available upon request.
AppsFlyer positions itself as the world leader in protection against install fraud, works with over 12,000 brands, has 8,000 technology partners. Customer-centric strategy, privacy, smart business decisions - all to help marketers to grow their business, to drive innovation.
Key features:
HUMAN offers advertisers and advertising platforms protection against a wide range of threats associated with digital advertising fraud. HUMAN is a young company. It was founded in 2012, but despite this, in 2016 it received MRC (Media Rating Council) accreditation for its advanced algorithms for detecting fake traffic.
The two main products are MediaGuard and FraudSensor. They are designed to filter out “non-human” advertising traffic and prevent certain types of advertising fraud.
Protection against ad fraud is not the only industry HUMAN works in. Cybersecurity and bot detection are also areas of activity HUMAN is involved in.
In 2016, White Ops discovered the Methbot botnet. About 6,000 online publications and platforms were affected, including Facebook (which later became an extremist organization and is now banned in the Russian Federation). In 2017, White Ops specialists discovered another similar network, 3ve, which was “running,” as it later turned out, on 1.7 million infected computers. Then, White Ops’ activities ended with 13 indictments.
HUMAN cooperates with such well-known companies as Adobe Advertising Cloud, Telaria, Beachfront Media, Trade Desk, Media.net. Since 2018, HUMAN has also been dealing with issues of preventing fraud with television advertising.
In addition to being an advocate for human rights, HUMAN is also an advocate for privacy: it does not track users, it cares about their privacy, it detects bots. This user-focused strategy has helped the company gain trust and expand significantly around the world: HUMAN code runs on many websites and applications, and it can be found more often than antivirus solutions.
Key features:
Fraud Score is a highly accurate and multifunctional platform for combating fraud, one of the market leaders. Experts from different fields united to create it: from digital marketing experts to data processing specialists. The goal of FraudScore is protection against all types of advertising fraud, which successfully works not only with mobile traffic. It has been among the industry leaders since 2016.
Fraudscore uses a process known as “fraud scoring” to replace binary decisions such as “fraudster” or “not fraudster.” Every install, conversion, channel, traffic source, or offer receives a unique expert assessment of the likelihood and severity of fraud, and where appropriate, a detailed report that can serve as the basis for decisions made. This method provides clients with reliable tools to conduct serious fraud cases, to defend their position on each event, and to provide a solid basis for negotiations.
FraudScore is a so-called "full cycle" technology for detecting advertising fraud at every stage of the funnel: from requests for preliminary forecasts to analysis of final impressions and clicks. Evaluation of installations, conversions, events - all web traffic is analyzed, not just mobile, all stages of the notorious sales funnel are carefully studied.
An important feature is that FraudScore interacts perfectly with other solutions, including those discussed in this article: AppsFlyer, FuseClick, Adjust, and setting up the integration takes no more than 5 minutes!
Key features:
Branch Metrics offers its own truly sophisticated approach to detecting fraudulent activity. Instead of relying on the conventional approach of identifying characteristic patterns, Branch Metrics relies on its massive global identification network.
When you study how Branch Metrics works, you really understand what Big Data is and why it is the future of the field.
Over 40,000 mobile-first businesses use Branch Metrics to integrate mobile metrics and user behavior across devices, platforms, and advertising channels. Deep linking, user routing, mobile advertising—all the most advanced technologies to improve sales conversion, customer acquisition, and retention.
The basic demo allows you to explore all the features. Branch Metrics has several pricing tiers. Use usually costs from $60 to $200 per month, mainly depending on the amount of traffic.
Key features:
Singular protects your ad spend from fraud with a system developed and maintained by a team of highly trained scientists. Staying one step ahead of the bad guys is the strategy to counter attacks.
Using Singular, you can create unique rules that are tailored to your specific applications and advertising strategy, thereby increasing the return on your advertising spend and avoiding unnecessary expenses caused by fraud.
As stated on the official website: “Get a complete view of your return on investment (ROI) with next-generation technology that connects marketing data across the entire funnel,” “We are the best-in-class fraud prevention system.”
With Singular's open integration platform, you can track and report on all of your advertising channels: in-app, cross-platform, online, referral, email, even SMS and TV.
You can trace relationships, analyze data, calculate ROI and marketing metrics for each ad campaign, publisher, approach, and even keyword.
If you read the company's blog, where they cover in sufficient detail all the difficulties that have to be overcome in order to collect and link individual data together, then even the average user will understand why the fight against fraud in the digital world is such a complex undertaking.
Key features:
It can be said that mFilterIt is a pioneer in terms of detecting and stopping in-app ad fraud. Their solutions are based on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analysis.
“Our mission is to build trust, maintain integrity, and drive growth and value across the digital ecosystem,” the project’s website says. “We are an indispensable tool in the digital marketer’s bag.”
mFilterIt is recognized by marketers worldwide and has helped over 500 clients in 15 countries with its mission to bring trust and transparency to the world of digital advertising, saving organizations over $400 million.
mFilterIt's ad traffic verification solution is a full-service ad fraud protection suite, with a team of technologists and data scientists constantly developing new methods to improve your ROI:
Key features:
Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) is a pioneer in combating affiliate fraud, protecting brand reputation, and preventing customers from having negative online experiences.
VPT closely monitors information on the network related to companies that have entrusted us with the care of their reputation.
Fraud detection solutions and services include:
Key features:
The presented solutions differ in approaches, scope, and price of services. However, it is absolutely clear that any choice is better than none. And those who do not have a properly organized system of statistics and reporting are in the most difficult situation, those who will not notice (or will notice too late) that they have been subjected to unfair competition from competitors or fraudsters.
Source
When they talk about advertising fraud, they don’t mean that they “blatantly lie and don’t blush,” but that digital technologies are used to cause harm.
This article will be interesting not only for entrepreneurs: many will probably understand why, after installing a fun app for downloading the most fashionable wallpapers, the phone began to discharge quickly, and the Internet is constantly slowing down.
Often, entrepreneurs - especially those representing small and medium-sized businesses - either do not know at all about the existence of online advertising fraud, or have only a superficial understanding of it.
We will learn about various scammers' tricks, as well as tactics to counter them, and review the best tools for detecting fraudulent advertising activities - everything to ensure that desperate efforts to promote a business (often spent on the last of your money) do not go to waste.
What are we dealing with?
Digital advertising is an indispensable tool in the era of the Web and software technologies. New automation tools are constantly appearing, convenient for advertisers, marketers, and advertising platform holders - regardless of the scale of the activity, be it a lone blogger or an entire advertising network.And if so, then it is impossible to avoid encounters with scammers. This will surprise some, but it is also becoming difficult not to become their accomplices.
Advertising fraud is not a new phenomenon. In the advertising technology industry, it is a long-standing problem that requires more and more attention year after year. The diversity of advertising tools of marketers is growing - naturally, the scale of the disaster is increasing.
This refers to the deliberate distortion or manipulation of engagement metrics in order to generate fake traffic and false ad impressions, which in turn negatively impacts true click-through rates and, therefore, profits.
How do they do it?
Falsification of impressions, clicks, installations, even discrediting the advertising itself by publishing it on dubious resources - all in order to directly earn fraudulent money or fulfill an "order" for sabotage.Fraud with mobile app installations stands somewhat apart. It manifests itself in the most unexpected forms and is not always easy to detect.
To get their bribe, fraudsters are forced to create programs that adapt to the actions of real users and affect the flow of the normal advertising process - they fake traffic, distort the number of impressions and clicks. Of course, this is not done manually, but with the help of various automation tools, such as bots.
Most fraudulent activities involve baiting bots to click on ads. The entrepreneur who paid for the ad will pay for each such click or view in the hopes of attracting new customers.
But the customers won't come. Those who "clicked on the ad" don't need anything more than a tiny bit of electricity - they have no other needs.
Everyone benefits:
- competitors who ordered the click fraud;
- advertising platforms that quickly “fulfilled” their advertising obligations;
- scammers who "made some easy money."
Everyone... Except for the entrepreneur who paid for this celebration of technology with his last money.
Click fraud is not the only form of advertising fraud. Therefore, it is important for everyone who is not on the dark side to have a good understanding of the peculiarities of modern mobile marketing and to understand all the techniques that are in the arsenal of attackers. It is advisable to do this before irreparable damage is done to the marketing strategy and the advertising budget is zeroed out.
Sorting of evil spirits
There are many types of advertising fraud. Some of them affect only advertisers, and some affect regular users.Geomasking
The cost of advertising traffic depends heavily on the location of its source on the planet.
For example, the highest cost of traffic comes from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Despite this, most sellers prefer to deal with visitors from these countries because they make the most expensive purchases. Thus, investing more money in more expensive traffic really pays off because it is high-quality.
The essence of the deception here is that fraudsters sell low-quality traffic, disguising it as high-quality by replacing the true geographic location of the source. Using geomasking, fraudsters can resell one type of traffic as another at a high price.
The fraud will be revealed when the hapless entrepreneur discovers a low click conversion rate. The good thing here is that this type of fraud is determined quickly and easily. The only condition is that all business processes must be built correctly so that the discrepancy with the expected indicators is immediately noticeable.
Advertisement overlay
As the name suggests, one advertisement “hides” others underneath itself: the user will see only one advertising block – the one that is on top of all of them.
Advertisers of hidden blocks will expect their ads to be shown. Moreover, they will also pay for it.
By hiding one advertisement behind another, the fraudster collects money for all ad impressions, while the user sees only one of them.
One-pixel ad
This type of fraud is similar to "advertising overlay". The essence is the same - the technical approach is different.
Narrowing the ad unit to an extremely small size (1×1 pixel) allows you to place a lot of advertising and collect money for its display. Technically, it is sort of implemented: requests are sent, counter readings are updated. But people do not see the advertising, just as in the case of overlay.
The method can be used multiple times on one page, allowing scammers to receive multiple impressions of different ads at the same time, even if they are actually only seen by gnomes on the monitor.
Advertising hack
Here, the scammers take over the server. Not physically, of course, but they get the ability to store information on it. The real owners' access is not limited, and they may not suspect anything.
Most often, attackers replace the content of advertising blocks. In rare cases, they use this method to place advertising on sites where it is not usually shown.
Cookies
When you visit a website, small text files known as cookies are used to store information about your browsing: time, duration, behavior – you name it.
Unfortunately, fraudsters can gain access even to these text files. By changing the contents of a cookie file , it is possible, for example, to fraudulently report consumer purchases.
Scammers use this tactic to collect money they haven't earned. By downloading fake cookies into users' browsers, they directly steal commissions from legitimate affiliates.
Clickbaiting and the "evil eye"
Special software (and sometimes people) click on advertisements or view them mindlessly.
Technically, this can be done in fundamentally different ways:
- using dedicated computers (usually networked);
- by hiring workers;
- through infection of devices.
With dedicated computers, everything is clear: they rent a server and run a bunch of bots on it.
Hiring protein bots instead of silicon ones is more interesting. Entire “farms” can be used for this — large enterprises where large groups of low-paid workers are hired to watch ads, click on advertising links, install applications, scroll through videos, and so on. The goal is still the same — deception and money.
Since such farms are often found in low-income countries, it is usually not difficult to identify the activity of such a farm in advertisements and applications.
Ghost in the phone
The user can click on advertisements without even suspecting it. The advertising ghost that he has hooked by installing a wallpaper or voice changer program or some other very useful "app" does it for him. Yes, the ghost can click on advertisements not alone, but in a whole company.
In essence, it's the same as with a dedicated computer or a person on a bot farm - only the devices of ordinary users are used. It is not necessary to install an infected application to become a participant (or victim) of this zombie network - it is enough to catch a "virus" in the usual way.
Here the user has no idea that his actions are not limited to what he does himself. A battery saving program or a super launcher or another extremely necessary application, which an authoritative site with jokes and half-naked celebrities advised him to install, works for him.
Buns
Such ghosts can only be active when a new mobile application is installed. By actively generating clicks, the malicious program tries to replace the one whose link the user followed to download the application in the eyes of interested parties.
It should be said that it is not always about money. It could be, for example, "credits for downloading" or some other marketing perks. When a user installs a "new application", all the "old" ones, including malicious ones, find out about it - they generate fake "clicks", attributing the download to a fraudster.
It's akin to showing up at a random stranger's front door and pretending to be their long-lost relative, hoping to be invited in for a free meal.
It is unlikely that you will be successfully accepted as a real relative, however, if you visit 40 houses every day for a month, your chances of getting a free meal increase significantly.
The most primitive malware doesn't even wait for the app to start installing: it imitates clicks en masse. Continuing with the analogy of the impudent person, this time you arrive exactly when dinner is being served. You simply sit down at the laid table and hope that the host will accidentally mistake you for a real guest and feed you.
And the one paying for the “banquet” is the smartphone user who carelessly downloaded the malware.
Useful tools and tactics
1. Traffic Guard
The purpose of Traffic Guard is to detect signs of fraud before there is a risk of damage to the budget. Such a warning system can significantly reduce financial losses.
The Traffic Guard system is integrated into the advertising process, receives and analyzes reliable information about impressions, clicks, conversions and other events - everything to detect anything wrong at the earliest stages. "A proactive strategy that helps confidently scale and optimize advertising" - this is how the creators describe themselves.
Traffic Guard was founded in 2015 and is now a division of Adveritas Limited, a company with global operations and a listing on the Australian Securities Exchange.
Leading international companies such as Rappi, GoJek, major game developer Glu Mobile, mobile advertising agency MUV, e-commerce giants Bukalapak and Centauro trust Traffic Guard specialists and solutions with the security of their advertising budgets.
Traffic Guard algorithms try to act very carefully, based on inconsistencies in statistical analysis. This is another difference from other solutions, which can often be compared to elephants in a china shop, blocking traffic sources in batches based on broad criteria.
Another important advantage is the openness and transparency of algorithms. Traffic Guard is ready to justify each incident of interaction cancellation, not only to its client, but also to advertising agencies and other interested parties.
This approach effectively protects genuine traffic and at the same time has a small number of false positives. And if you consider that all the worries associated with wasting time on sending spreadsheets, manual verification and the like disappear; consider that it becomes possible to optimize advertising campaigns in real time - it becomes difficult to overestimate the usefulness of Traffic Guard.
Key features:
- three levels of fraud prevention;
- detection of fraud and fake traffic for each individual impression, click, event;
- detailed report for each transaction;
- specialized report for traffic providers;
- using machine learning to identify new threats.
2. Adjust
Adjust is aimed at combating fraud in mobile advertising. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, in order to bite off their piece of advertising budgets, attackers use fraudulent installations, clicks, traffic, impressions on mobile applications.
Advertisers will pay for everything, but they will receive meaningless data that will not lead to a connection with real users of the application and will not allow focusing on the target audience.
Adjust offers advertisers a suite of tools that can be used to:
- identifying suspicious IP addresses associated with fake installations;
- getting rid of fraudulent clicks;
- identifying and blocking “hyper-involvement”;
- protection against spam clicks.
A comprehensive set of mobile ad fraud prevention technologies is bundled together in the Adjust Fraud Prevention Suite.
Adjust focuses on identifying signs of fraudulent activity and preventing further technical interaction (unlike most similar systems, which are designed to fight against groups of people or devices). This approach simultaneously builds reliable protection on the one hand, and on the other, does not allow the loss of real traffic and does not underestimate the number of installations.
While Adjust is used by Yelp, Spotify, SoundCloud (to name a few of the world's biggest names), it remains a product for small businesses and is ideal for them precisely because of how thorough the sifting is. That's its founding concept and remains so to this day.
Key features:
- independent assessment of what is happening with traffic and appropriate response;
- unlimited access to source data;
- reliable fraud prevention;
- many ready-made marketing solutions, including process automation;
- excellent customer service;
3. Perform[cb]
While Perform is not a direct fraud prevention solution, it does provide significant protection against it.
The company's core strategy is "pay for results," which helps brands grow their customer base through digital media.
Perform uses proprietary technologies, sophisticated algorithms (some of which are rule-based, others rely on machine learning), and proprietary tools to automatically optimize your ad campaign while detecting ad fraud.
Every professional marketer can customize the tools provided to best suit their strategy: define the target market, traffic, set additional rules and conditions. Attracting as many customers as possible becomes an achievable goal. Perform has many ways to help with this.
The prices, it must be said, are somewhat different from the options discussed above. But they are more flexible. Perform offers a complex model of payment based on the cost per action. You can pay per click, per interaction, per lead, per installation, per sale — there is no point in listing everything here. But regardless of what type of activity the entrepreneur decides to focus on, fraud protection always works.
This service has a lot to offer in terms of marketing and audience development.
Key features:
- patented technologies;
- experienced managers;
- 24/7 support, 7 days a week.
4. AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer offers mobile app marketers sophisticated solutions to protect against fraud with the attribution of authorship of the installation at all stages: "before", "during" and "after". The debugged multi-level protection against all forms of fraud with mobile advertising is based on machine learning, an established database, and biometric behavioral analysis.
Custom validation rules, real-time protection, reliable CPA (Cost Per Action - a model of payment for online advertising, in which only certain user actions are paid for) - this is just a part of a large list of technologies aimed at preserving the advertising budget.
Deep analysis of the relationships between individual metrics allows you to increase sales, installations, LTV (Lifetime Value). There are special functions for individual user adaptation, conversion optimization, flexible selection of the best option and deployment of all necessary tools.
A free 30-day trial period is given (basic features). Tariff plans are available upon request.
AppsFlyer positions itself as the world leader in protection against install fraud, works with over 12,000 brands, has 8,000 technology partners. Customer-centric strategy, privacy, smart business decisions - all to help marketers to grow their business, to drive innovation.
Key features:
- fast and sophisticated integration with a wide range of marketing platforms;
- With OneLink, you can create deep links to leads from all your activities;
- full control via iOS;
- detailed configuration of settings for any applications;
- convenient "dashboard" with a quick overview;
- flexible reporting;
- easy to learn editor.
5. HUMAN (formerly White Ops)
HUMAN offers advertisers and advertising platforms protection against a wide range of threats associated with digital advertising fraud. HUMAN is a young company. It was founded in 2012, but despite this, in 2016 it received MRC (Media Rating Council) accreditation for its advanced algorithms for detecting fake traffic.
The two main products are MediaGuard and FraudSensor. They are designed to filter out “non-human” advertising traffic and prevent certain types of advertising fraud.
Protection against ad fraud is not the only industry HUMAN works in. Cybersecurity and bot detection are also areas of activity HUMAN is involved in.
In 2016, White Ops discovered the Methbot botnet. About 6,000 online publications and platforms were affected, including Facebook (which later became an extremist organization and is now banned in the Russian Federation). In 2017, White Ops specialists discovered another similar network, 3ve, which was “running,” as it later turned out, on 1.7 million infected computers. Then, White Ops’ activities ended with 13 indictments.
HUMAN cooperates with such well-known companies as Adobe Advertising Cloud, Telaria, Beachfront Media, Trade Desk, Media.net. Since 2018, HUMAN has also been dealing with issues of preventing fraud with television advertising.
In addition to being an advocate for human rights, HUMAN is also an advocate for privacy: it does not track users, it cares about their privacy, it detects bots. This user-focused strategy has helped the company gain trust and expand significantly around the world: HUMAN code runs on many websites and applications, and it can be found more often than antivirus solutions.
Key features:
- application security;
- 10 trillion transactional interactions per week;
- processing of 2500 dynamic signals from devices, networks, behavioral patterns, analyzed using 350 algorithms.
6. Fraud Score
Fraud Score is a highly accurate and multifunctional platform for combating fraud, one of the market leaders. Experts from different fields united to create it: from digital marketing experts to data processing specialists. The goal of FraudScore is protection against all types of advertising fraud, which successfully works not only with mobile traffic. It has been among the industry leaders since 2016.
Fraudscore uses a process known as “fraud scoring” to replace binary decisions such as “fraudster” or “not fraudster.” Every install, conversion, channel, traffic source, or offer receives a unique expert assessment of the likelihood and severity of fraud, and where appropriate, a detailed report that can serve as the basis for decisions made. This method provides clients with reliable tools to conduct serious fraud cases, to defend their position on each event, and to provide a solid basis for negotiations.
FraudScore is a so-called "full cycle" technology for detecting advertising fraud at every stage of the funnel: from requests for preliminary forecasts to analysis of final impressions and clicks. Evaluation of installations, conversions, events - all web traffic is analyzed, not just mobile, all stages of the notorious sales funnel are carefully studied.
An important feature is that FraudScore interacts perfectly with other solutions, including those discussed in this article: AppsFlyer, FuseClick, Adjust, and setting up the integration takes no more than 5 minutes!
Key features:
- more than 150 indicators are used to accurately detect fraud;
- detects fraud at all conversion levels;
- prevents click fraud in real time;
- As new fraud schemes emerge, they are identified by machine learning-based algorithms;
- creating incident reports;
- Each client is given a personal manager.
7. Branch Metrics
Branch Metrics offers its own truly sophisticated approach to detecting fraudulent activity. Instead of relying on the conventional approach of identifying characteristic patterns, Branch Metrics relies on its massive global identification network.
When you study how Branch Metrics works, you really understand what Big Data is and why it is the future of the field.
Over 40,000 mobile-first businesses use Branch Metrics to integrate mobile metrics and user behavior across devices, platforms, and advertising channels. Deep linking, user routing, mobile advertising—all the most advanced technologies to improve sales conversion, customer acquisition, and retention.
The basic demo allows you to explore all the features. Branch Metrics has several pricing tiers. Use usually costs from $60 to $200 per month, mainly depending on the amount of traffic.
Key features:
- powerful analytics capabilities;
- tracking return on investment (ROI);
- separate manager for each account;
- filtering out postscripts;
- interaction to redirect traffic with any existing partner of the client.
8. Singular
Singular protects your ad spend from fraud with a system developed and maintained by a team of highly trained scientists. Staying one step ahead of the bad guys is the strategy to counter attacks.
Using Singular, you can create unique rules that are tailored to your specific applications and advertising strategy, thereby increasing the return on your advertising spend and avoiding unnecessary expenses caused by fraud.
As stated on the official website: “Get a complete view of your return on investment (ROI) with next-generation technology that connects marketing data across the entire funnel,” “We are the best-in-class fraud prevention system.”
With Singular's open integration platform, you can track and report on all of your advertising channels: in-app, cross-platform, online, referral, email, even SMS and TV.
You can trace relationships, analyze data, calculate ROI and marketing metrics for each ad campaign, publisher, approach, and even keyword.
If you read the company's blog, where they cover in sufficient detail all the difficulties that have to be overcome in order to collect and link individual data together, then even the average user will understand why the fight against fraud in the digital world is such a complex undertaking.
Key features:
- Connect your marketing data from anywhere;
- automated data standardization using error-proof schemas;
- accurate reporting of costs and return on investment;
- Blocking large volumes of fraud with industry-leading prevention;
- visualization of advertising resources and their effectiveness in a convenient format.
9. mFilterIt
It can be said that mFilterIt is a pioneer in terms of detecting and stopping in-app ad fraud. Their solutions are based on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analysis.
“Our mission is to build trust, maintain integrity, and drive growth and value across the digital ecosystem,” the project’s website says. “We are an indispensable tool in the digital marketer’s bag.”
mFilterIt is recognized by marketers worldwide and has helped over 500 clients in 15 countries with its mission to bring trust and transparency to the world of digital advertising, saving organizations over $400 million.
mFilterIt's ad traffic verification solution is a full-service ad fraud protection suite, with a team of technologists and data scientists constantly developing new methods to improve your ROI:
- reliable solutions for traffic analysis;
- fraud detection for both apps and online campaigns;
- protecting digital spending across all media platforms;
- comprehensive operational service support.
Key features:
- Machine learning-based algorithm is used to track regular users and counterfeit devices;
- identifies installations and events coming from compromised devices, botnets and blacklisted IP addresses;
- identifies unique characteristics of the device for authentication;
- analyzes data patterns for each event to identify behavioral aspects.
10. Virus Positive Technologies
Virus Positive Technologies (VPT) is a pioneer in combating affiliate fraud, protecting brand reputation, and preventing customers from having negative online experiences.
VPT closely monitors information on the network related to companies that have entrusted us with the care of their reputation.
Fraud detection solutions and services include:
- detecting and protecting your brand from affiliate fraud;
- tracking partners' marketing initiatives;
- verification of compliance with the terms of network agreements.
Key features:
- brand monitoring tools;
- Predictive analytics;
- monitoring indicators to identify violations;
- affiliate network monitoring;
- reports and metrics based on various indicators;
- customizable dashboards for reporting and data visualization;
- preventing hijacking of user activity.
To sum it up…
The number of cases of advertising fraud is growing and growing all over the world despite high-tech counteraction. Those who think about threats, use advanced knowledge in this area, rely on the offered tools are protected.The presented solutions differ in approaches, scope, and price of services. However, it is absolutely clear that any choice is better than none. And those who do not have a properly organized system of statistics and reporting are in the most difficult situation, those who will not notice (or will notice too late) that they have been subjected to unfair competition from competitors or fraudsters.
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