Ad fraud is the biggest issues marketers and developers face today.
In 2015 ad fraud costed digital advertisers more than $8.6 billion and in 2018 this amount was $19 billion!
This causes advertisers losing more than money, fraudsters also distort the data they receive by using fake users, fake traffic and fake downloads. And this wrong data affects their future marketing efforts badly.
Don’t get discouraged! There are solutions, and its called: Mobile fraud detection. First you identify the problem and work on finding a solution. Let’s start listing how you can identify mobile fraud.
Monitor Your Data
One of the most effective things you can do is setting key metrics and benchmarks to monitör regularly. In the World of marketing, you have to monitör your data regularly to control the effectiveness of your efforts and develop new strategies. So if you have this approach, developing another monitoring mechanism to fight with fraud is not going to be a problem.
You can start with some of the best key metrics and work your way from them:
- Industry standards and industry average statistics
- Behavioral data on post install events
- Conversion rates per source
- Blacklisted traffic sources
Best practices can give you the starting point but you have to select the metrics that fits your business and market uniquely, there’s no one-size fits all approach.
Create a Database of Blacklisted IP’s
Once you identified a publisher or a specific IP as fraudster or fraud-likely you can add it to a blacklist for future use. All IP’s of the same hosting can be blocked after verification. This behaviour can be the result of fraud but also can prevent future frauds and serve as a prevention mechanism to save you thousands maybe millions of advertising budget.
Develop an Industry Wide Blacklist
If all the companies join forces to fight fraudsters, the whole process would be easier. Like you create your own publisher and IP blacklist, other companies do the same too. Combining this effort would save all of you money and time. When creating a industry wide blacklist, it should be neutrally maintained and everyone that has the same agenda can access and contribute to it.
Mobile ad fraud detection is not easy, but it definitely benefits your whole business process. Developing a mechanism for ad fraud detection is a must in today’s climate.
