The mobile advertising sector is worth billions of dollars, but not all of it goes directly to genuine users. A significant portion is lost to fraud, which instills fear in advertisers, who are unwilling to pay for actions that don't happen. This matter is known as Mobile Ad Fraud, and it stands as one of the largest threats that application marketers face today. Theft of ad budgets and data integrity creates discomfort by undermining the very basis for mobile growth.
In today's world of advanced tools for measuring mobile advertising, combining analytics and fraud protection gives organizations a lot more peace of mind about measuring campaigns. Along with advanced tools, it allows your organization to better address mobile ad fraud.
Mobile Ad Fraud can be described as any form of dishonest behavior that changes the way mobile advertising and its associated systems work. Fraudsters subject the advertisers to spoofed installs, bot activity, or abusive use of stolen user data to deceive the advertisers into paying for clicks, installs, or in-app utilization that did not really occur.
To combat this, marketers typically look to a mobile measurement partner (MMP). An example of a trusted MMP is Apptrove, which will assist businesses in tracking real performance while blocking fraud at the same time. Apptrove gives organizations both analytics and fraud protection.
This is a waste of money and creates a false set of data. The marketers may think their campaign is flourishing and it produces fake traffic associated with their campaigns. Without safe and trustworthy data, you are nearly blind to optimize and driving any return from the campaigns.
The scale of Mobile Ad Fraud is tremendous. Global reports suggest advertisers waste more than $80 billion on fraud every year. Some application types can experience fraud rates as high as 30% or higher. In short, as many as 1 in 3 reported installs may not be real installs at all.
For businesses operating on tight budgets, this type of waste can have severe impacts. For example, a startup could spend half of its budget (say $10,000) on fraudulent clicks, which shouldn’t be considered an ad campaign, as it is fraud, and they think they can reach new users. In essence, the startup pays for bot activity. And this is why, in 2023, strong fraud protection is no longer an option.
Mobile ad fraud can be found in a variety of forms, but here are some of the most common:
Click Spam – Bots or fraudulent systems generate hundreds, if not thousands, of illegitimate clicks and substantially inflate the number of users who appear to be engaging with ads.
Click Injection – Fraudsters take advantage of legitimate installs and send fake signals to an advertising system, moments before opening an app, and then steal credit for the install.
Fake Installs – Device farms or emulators will manipulate devices and simulate thousands of installs of an app in order to falsely inflate performance metrics.
SDK Spoofing – Fraudsters will manipulate user data to mimic real users. This becomes difficult to decipher between fake activity versus genuine users.
By being able to spot these types of fraud early, marketers could minimize their chances of paying for results that do not benefit the growth of their business.
One of the largest assets in the fight against mobile ad fraud is the availability of real-time fraud detection. Rather than waiting for the advertising platform to provide data post-campaign, real-time fraud prevention solutions can identify the volume of suspicious activity as it is occurring. For example, if there are thousands of installs in a matter of seconds from the same location, the real-time solution will block that advertising traffic immediately.
Real-time fraud detection is a proactive way to save cost and time on advertising. It also enables advertisers to spend that money on real users instead of correcting their mistakes later. For example, Apptrove integrates with fraud detection platforms that enable real-time fraud detection.
Although detection is a necessity, mobile fraud prevention techniques take it a step further. To prevent fraud means intercepting fraud before it can do its damage to campaigns. This can include blocking traffic sources that are high-risk, verifying devices and employing sophisticated machine learning models to help predict fraud risks.
Mobile fraud prevention is especially important as fraudsters continue to adapt. Every year, fraudsters are developing new means to bypass detection. A company relying strictly on detection may fall behind. Prevention keeps advertisers one step ahead of the fraudster as they make the ad less susceptible to an attack in the first place.
Mobile Ad Fraud is one of the most significant challenges facing mobile marketing today. Investing billions in ad budgets each year, it's no longer an option to ignore. Utilising keyword rate detection, organizations can stop paying for per-click ad time before it has no choice but to drain budgets. Visiting the site and having strong mobile fraud prevention techniques will help continue to keep the broker one step ahead of the fraudster in the long run.
Partnering with Apptrove and their strong set of mobile measurement partners like Apptrove, helps ease the process. By utilizing analytics combined with end-to-end mobile fraud protection, Apptrove will help any organisation in the fight against fraud while driving growth. In a world where every single marketing dollar matters, preventing Mobile Ad Fraud and all the issues faced in this industry is paramount to success.
