Do I still need FouAnalytics, if ...

Folks have asked me if they still need FouAnalytics if they are already using inclusion lists, not buying from open web, and buying from PMPs ("private marketplaces"). The answer is no, you don't need FouAnalytics to detect and mitigate ad fraud because you likely have avoided most of the obvious ad fraud and bots already. But, once you've done the groundwork of avoiding obvious ad fraud, you are ready to do more advanced optimizations to make your campaigns yield even better results for you.

Many advertisers still have to reduce ad fraud (optimize away from dark red) because they have not switched to inclusion lists yet. And there are large numbers of bad guys' websites and apps that continue to chomp on their ad budgets. Some advertisers that have already avoided the obvious fraud by being very very strict on their media buying can more on to more advanced optimizations. See below.

Social media, Google search, YouTube ads

If you have turned off Facebook Audience Network (FAN), Google search partners, and Google Video Partners (GVP), respectively, you would have avoided 90% of the obvious fraud. You won't need FouAnalytics to reduce ad fraud. But it would be nice to have a FouAnalytics chart like the following, measured on the landing pages/websites with an on-site tag to confirm that the majority of the clicks from social media, Google search, and Youtube ads are indeed dark blue. Obviously not 100% of the clicks are dark blue. But you've already minimized the obvious bot clicks.

Programmatic on strict inclusion list

For programmatic ads, if you are using very strict inclusion lists, you will have avoided 90% of the obvious fake sites and mobile apps. But obviously the dark red is not 0%. This is because fake sites can simply declare their domain or app name to be one that is in your inclusion list. For example, if fakesite123 .com declares the domain to be espn .com in the bid request, and espn .com is in your inclusion list, it will get into your inclusion list campaign and steal your money. But if you have FouAnalytics to measure your ads with an in-ad tag, we can see if this is happening. The above is not caught by ads.txt and also not caught by the legacy fraud verification vendors. I won't go into a technical explanation here, but if you want to know why and how, message me.

Also, buying from a PMP ("private marketplace") or PG ("programmatic guaranteed") doesn't help you avoid ad fraud if the sites and apps in that PMP are fraudulent or are doing shady things. It really comes down to the list of sites and apps that you have in your inclusion list. A recent advertiser using FouAnalytics was able to cut their inclusion list from 15,000 sites and apps down to 1,500 using FouAnalytics data as a feedback loop. Not only did they cut out some obvious MFA sites and MFA apps that they couldn't see before, they could even adjust the CPM bid on a site by site basis to optimize their spend, based on the relative quality of the audiences on each site. This is a more advanced optimization, obviously, that most advertisers are not yet doing.

Optimizing towards dark blue (humans) and greater attentiveness

After you have minimized the dark red (bots and fraud) in your in-ad measurement, you can optimize towards more humans (dark blue) AND greater attentiveness on your sites. Here's a great example of an advertiser client optimizing towards dark blue in their campaign. Really great work on their part, increasing dark blue from 20+% to 50% to nearly 70% in the most recent data.

And below is an example of optimizing towards greater attentiveness. Attentiveness means the percentage of users that did something on your landing page; you can think of it as the opposite of "high bounce." For example, in charts below, the left side shows that 66 - 69% of the users (arriving from Google search) clicked something on the landing page. That is "high attentiveness." In contrast, the right side shows "low attentiveness" because only 7% of the users (arriving from paid display ads) clicked something on the landing page.

Note that "attentiveness" already includes the concepts of viewability (whether the ad had an opportunity to be seen) and "attention." This is because the ad had to have been viewable, and the user had to have paid attention to the ad so that the creative message of the ad caused them to click and arrive on your landing page. Humans that deliberately click an ad wanted to find out something more on your site. So they are likely to do something like move the mouse, click something, scroll the page, touch the screen (smartphone). More advanced advertisers are using FouAnalytics "attentiveness" to also optimize ad creatives too. Ad creative A drives more attentive humans on the site than creative B, so they can increase the frequency of creative A.

And a final thought. FouAnalytics is analytics, not just bot detection or fraud verification. Just like you wouldn't remove Google Analytics from your site if you think there's no more bot traffic, you wouldn't remove FouAnalytics from your site or your ads. You want to have analytics in place so you can verify that the ads you are buying are actually going to the sites and apps in your inclusion list, and if not, why not. More advertisers and agencies are using FouAnalytics so they can SEE better. Then they can DO better, compared to when they only had legacy fraud verification.

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