Programmatic Advertising Fraud

Programmatic advertising is one of the fastest growing segments of digital marketing. However, not everything is so smooth: the notorious “dark side” of online advertising industry is a digital ad fraud, which is becoming a serious dilemma.

First of all, it’s worth mentioning, that fraud is a concern of all digital advertising, not only programmatic. However, in comparison to direct-sold inventory, programmatic inventory especially the one that is sold in open marketplaces generally sees more ad fraud. This happens because open marketplaces rely heavily on intermediaries, which makes it easier for cybercriminals to get into the transaction chain and RTB ecosystem.

Let’s have a closer look at what digital fraud actually is. In a nutshell,

Non-Human Traffic: Bots and Botnets.

- Bots and botnets stimulate the activity of a real user browsing internet or using an app. Bots are evolving and becoming more sophisticated and some of them are so smart, they can move mouse cursor to imitate human behavior, click on links, click from one website to another, watch videos, and even add items to the shopping cart! Malicious bots generate false impressions, serve malware or spam and trigger retargeted ads.

Human Traffic: ad stacking, pixel stuffing, domain spoofing, cookie stuffing, ad injection, click farms;

- Ad Stacking and Impression Stacking is basically hiding ads in a way that there is almost no chance for a human eye to see it. It could be hiding the ad behind other ads, in a way that only the top one is seen, but others in the pile remain unseen.

- Pixel stuffing is very similar. The ad is technically present on page, but it’s “stuffed” into a single pixel, which makes it so small, impossible to spot for a human eye. Since end users are real people, it makes it more complicated for vendors to

Most commonly, click farms are sprouting in developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Venezuela, etc. Here are few things you can do today to eliminate Ad Fraud:

- Demand transparency from your publishers and continuously monitor sourced traffic;

- Start using services such as bot detection or domain detection;

- Keep an eye on ad injection and update blacklists on a daily basis;

- Keep in mind that bots prefer websites relates to family, food, finance and news & bots activity usually escalates at night between 11 pm and 5 am so consider adjusting your ad campaign to that information;

- Block countries like India, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Phillines, Bangladesh which with highest fraudulent scores;

- Follow your intuition – if something looks suspicious and too good to be true, then apparently it is;

- Invest in advanced “fraud watchdogs” like Telemetry, Forensiq, White Ops, Spider.io and other third-party monitoring;

- Reveal your anti-fraud policy to