6 of 6 Advertisers are Switching to FouAnalytics

It's been a long road, spending the last 10 years swimming upstream against the current of "no one wants to hear that" led by private and public attacks from the Association of National Advertisers and Trustworthy Accountability Group CEO Mike Zaneis. None of that matters because here we are. Finally. Six of six advertisers that piloted FouAnalytics this year will be adopting it as their digital media analytics platform going into 2023. They didn't even need to find new budget for it, since they had already been paying for fraud verification. They are just shifting the budget over to FouAnalytics and upgrading their "tools."

Despite all of the above, you still don't have to take my word for it. You are still welcome to do a no-cost pilot of FouAnalytics so you can "see Fou yourself" with your own data. The quickest way to run the pilot is to pick a current programmatic campaign and have your agency copy and paste a FouAnalytics in-ad tag into the DSP or ad server. Within a day of the start of data collection, I can give you an assessment of the quality of your campaign. You are welcome to run the tag for up to 1 month or 100 million impressions so we have a lot of data to look at together. I will not only show you how to use FouAnalytics yourself, I will write up 10 - 15 slides with my observations and recommendations, specific to your campaign. Even if you are not ready to buy an annual FouAnalytics Enterprise subscription, you will still have my recommendations which you can act upon in your current campaign.

How to use FouAnalytics to Scrutinize Clicks from Programmatic Campaigns

How Advertisers Use FouAnalytics to Troubleshoot Bot Traffic on Landing Pages

I've written about how advertisers are using FouAnalytics in the articles above, but I will assemble a few highlights for you below.

Do your fraud vendor reports give you sufficient detail to know which sites and mobile apps to add to block list? If the largest buckets are "mobile in-app" you can't see which apps are committing fraud. If buckets of "N/A" are labeled "99.9% fraud free" how would you know where your ads went? FouAnalytics in the same campaign showed that ads went to casino, gambling, crime, lotto, scratch-off, kids coloring, and other other suspicious mobile apps. With the specific app names from FouAnalytics, the advertiser could add the ones they wanted to block to their block list.

Do you get reports from your fraud vendor so you can gut check whether clicks are real or not, and whether the clicks are useful or not. Without even talking about bot clicks, see the charts below from FouAnalytics in-ad measurement. The first row shows clusters of clicks in the upper right corner of a 300x250 ad. Those users were trying to close the ad not click the ad. For contrast, the examples in the second row show clicks better distributed across the entire area of the 300x250 ad. Those clicks can be counted as clicks for your campaigns.

When advertisers use the FouAnalytics on-site tag, they can doublecheck (not double verify) the clicks that come from their programmatic campaigns, and other forms of paid media as well. In the 6 examples below, 95 - 99% of the clicks were bots (orange + red) and only 1 - 4% of the clicks were humans (dark blue). Advertisers were only counting clicks before, since they only had Google Analytics on their landing pages. With FouAnalytics, they can now see if the clicks are humans versus bots, so they can more easily optimize their paid digital campaigns. The slide further below shows the relative quality of 8 different paid sources. Not only can you optimize away from orange and red, you can optimize towards dark blue (humans).

Finally, does Google Analytics help you determine if your visitors are valuable, human? Most advertisers were looking at indicators like bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit, etc. in Google Analytics. Keep doing that, but also add FouAnalytics so you can see things like the following. Is it easy to tell which clicks are humans versus bots, even without the color coding? If you are seeing these for the first time, the large red circles are bot clicks. The size of the circle means the larger number of repeat clicks on the exact same x,y pixel location on the screen. Humans clicks (in blue) are spread out across the page, and some clusters are visible --where humans click on site navigation, menu buttons, links, etc.

You've been paying for fraud detection. Do you want to upgrade your tools? Do you want to have analytics for your digital media just like you have Google Analytics for your website? You can easily overcome "FOFO" ("fear of finding out") by running a FouAnalytics no-cost pilot; because once you find out (like the data above), you can do something about it. When you have better tools, you can "see Fou yourself" better and do more. This also solves "FOMO" ("fear of missing out") because you will the 7th of 7 advertisers to switch to FouAnalytics and you won't be missing out. ;-) Happy ad fraud hunting, y'all!