For decades advertisers have carefully crafted campaigns to target human audiences – genuine consumers who have the potential to buy their products or services. Since the advent of online advertising, ad impressions, or consumer views, have grown exponentially but recent research suggests these growing impressions are not necessarily coming from humans.
Twenty-first century advertisers are now embattled with the increasing amount of fraudulently generated non-human traffic (traffic fraud) and waging war on the internet bots responsible. It’s a costly war; a recent report from the Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps predicts that traffic fraud will cost the advertising industry $6bn in 2015.
What is traffic fraud?
Advertising prices are typically dependent on the number of impressions, so if a site sells ad inventory and subsequently generates false non-human traffic to increase overall impression count, the inventory will have been sold at a falsely inflated price. Two of the main types of traffic fraud are:
- Page fraud: When there are multiple adverts on a page, some of which are viewable, others are hidden or compressed to a minute size but all of which still generate ad impressions.
- Bot fraud: The more pervasive type of ad fraud. Bots – applications that run automated tasks over the internet – find their way on to unsuspecting users’ machines and mimic human behaviour by interacting with adverts behind-the-scenes and creating fake ad impressions. In 2014, bot-generated traffic accounted for as much as 11% of display ad impressions purchased and 23% of video ad impressions.
How is the industry responding?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has tasked a working group to investigate ad fraud and in September 2014, established a set of principles which the IAB has encouraged all players in the ad delivery ecosystem to sign up to.
In December 2014, the UK’s Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) – an independent body that defines best practice and standards for online ad trading – held the first cross-industry technical group meeting designed to tackle online ad fraud. JICWEBS aims to publish anti-fraud best practice principles for the UK by mid-2015 and to announce the first companies to be accredited for meeting industry-agreed standards to reduce the risk of fraudulent ads being served.
What are companies doing to combat ad fraud?
As the problem worsens, more and more companies are developing services to combat ad fraud:
- Integral Ad Science, a leading player in this area, has recently announced the opening of an Anti-Fraud Lab to conduct research and development that will help advance anti-fraud solutions in the advertising industry.
- comScore has recently developed Trust Profiles which enable ad buyers to assess the quality of ad space and to judge which sites have the most non-human or bot traffic running through their properties, as well as which ones offer the most viewable ad impressions.
- Forensiq – another company working to detect ad fraud – recently carried out a study, which focused on bot fraud. As part of their study, Forensiq produced a video which shows how a single infected machine can generate 10,000 fraudulent ad impressions over the course of 24 hours:
Who’s winning the war?
Traffic fraud has finally reached critical mass and major adtech players together with industry bodies are making a concerted effort to find a solution.
It remains to be seen who will win the development arms race – fraud detection technology or bot creators. However, these first steps should be welcomed by advertisers, since a united front across the industry has the highest likelihood of success in the war against the bots.
Adam Wright regularly contributes to ADTEKR.com, where this article was originally posted, and is an associate in the commercial team at Olswang working in the advertising and technology sectors. Follow on Twitter @adtekr.
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