Upon his capture in 1934, the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton was asked by FBI agents, “Why do you rob banks, Willie?” Sutton replied, dryly, “Because that’s where the money is.”
Where there is money to be made, there is money to be stolen. In the rapidly growing industry of online video advertising, especially in the programmatic arena, there is plenty of money to be made. Trillions of transactions, billions of dollars spent. Therefore, it is no surprise that with a multi-billion dollar industry comes multi-billion dollar theft.
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and White Ops collaborated on a 60-day study looking at the prevalence of bots. The study tracked 181 campaigns among 36 ANA members (including Walmart, Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark) and determined that bots cause 23% of all video impressions, 11% of display ads and would account for $6.3 billion in losses in 2015.
These studies are extremely beneficial because the more we know, the more we can fight back against fraudulent traffic that is costing the industry so much. We sat down with our in-house ad fraud expert, Dan Dectis, to find out more about ad fraud, define what it is exactly, and understand the best ways to combat it.
What are Bots/Botnets?
Bots are non-human automated systems that produce illegitimate traffic to publishers’ sites. Botnets are a network of personal computers infected with malicious software, malware, that turns them into “slave computers” (aka bots) managed by a botnet controller. The botnet controller can cause these computers to carry out a variety of behaviors, including ad fraud. When executing ad fraud, the computers in the botnet render or click on ads, resulting in advertisers having to pay for an ad impression or a click that was never actually served to a real human. Due to this fraudulent traffic, it might appear like you’re reaching your specific audience. A bot can look like a fashion enthusiast, someone in a specific income bracket, someone interested in buying a car, or someone shopping for holiday gifts. A perfect representation of this, although thoroughly over simplified, is the Adobe “Click Baby Click” ad.
It’s important to note that not all bots are bad bots!All search engines use bots to crawl and index the web. These bots however, will never negatively effect your computer, site, or user experience.
How do bots generate false traffic?
Beware! Bots can generate ad views while consumers browse unaware. They hijack user controls to generate fake clicks when the computer is dormant and run invisibly to simulate consumer activity, or compromise cookie data to simulate high-value consumers. They can even place unauthorized ads on sites where they don’t belong pushing unviewable ads onto a page in a single pixel.
Where did bots come from?
Fraud in digital advertising is a threat that has emerged over the past decade, beginning with click farms. Click farms are actual people that are paid to sit in a room and click on ads. What a job, huh? However, this practice wasn’t cost effective and just couldn’t scale, so scripts were generated to automate the process. As online advertising and online fraud protection has evolved, so has ad fraud.
Who is affected? / Who is responsible?
In short, everyone. Advertisers and publishers are affected and both can mitigate fraudulent traffic simply by taking preventative measures. For instance, advertisers can insist on the use of viewability and verification products from vendors such as Integral Ad Science or DoubleVerify. Products like these are the first line of defense against fraud; by monitoring delivery with their proprietary technology, these products can spot patterns that indicate suspicious/bot activity as well as non-viewable ads. Publishers can take similar steps by ensuring they only work with reputable advertisers who support the use of viewability and verification services.
How can I combat ad fraud on my video campaigns?
Good news! There is plenty you can do to protect against ad fraud. To ensure the integrity of video campaigns, you should always choose a trusted partner like Virool to help distribute your videos to a real audience. Here at Virool we have five lines of defense against ad fraud including a proprietary fraud monitoring system that uses algorithms to detect fraudulent impressions, rejecting those impressions before they make it into Virool’s platform. All impressions in Virool’s analytics are filtered impressions which are much more likely to be human traffic than bots. Although it is not yet possible to completely eradicate bot traffic altogether, Virool’s detection system is continuously learning and improving, and advertisers will never pay for impressions that the system deems fraudulent.
The post Beat the bot! What you need to know about ad fraud appeared first on Virool.
