"How long have we known about this (ad fraud) and why have we kept paying?"

Inspired by a post by Stephen Sumner -- "digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks powering large swathes of the online economy." And a comment on that post by Thomas Ross -- "the question that would undoubtedly be asked in a boardroom near you is, 'how long have we known this and why have we kept paying…!?'"

Marketers, here's your "get out of jail free" card. Actually, it's even better than that. It's an "avoid jail time entirely" card. What is? FouAnalytics is. I am not trying to sell you anything, because you are welcome to use FouAnalytics for free. Follow along.

Years of inaction caused by legacy fraud verification vendors

Why have marketers not taken more aggressive action against ad fraud, when practically every week, we hear new stories of unmitigated fraud and waste in digital advertising? Clearly marketers thought they already did something when they paid for legacy fraud verification, you know, the ones that have reported around 1% IVT ("invalid traffic") for the last 7 years straight? What WOULD you do if the fraud seemed so low? Of course, nothing. You would just continue spending your budgets, and even increasing your budgets. But now, in the face of an onslaught of news and examples of rampant ad fraud, advertisers are realizing that the 1% reported by these legacy fraud vendors is all the fraud they can catch, not all the fraud there is.

By upgrading to better tools -- ahem, FouAnalytics -- advertisers can see that despite paying for legacy fraud verification, 96 - 99% of the clicks they are getting from programmatic campaigns are orange and red (bots), versus 1 - 4% that are dark blue (humans). Along with massive quantities of ad impressions created by bots, the large numbers of clicks and high click through rates were also caused by bots. That's why campaigns appeared to be performing. Sales of soup and soda happened while digital marketing was being done. So advertisers assumed the sales were caused by the digital marketing, even when most of the ads were shown to bots.

Save me money

Many advertisers know that money is tight and will get more tight going forward. They are taking steps to try to save money. Buying even lower CPM ads but larger quantities of them will not save you money. Paying for services to do SPO (supply path optimization) or carbon footprint reduction, etc. will not save you money. Hint: it will cost you extra.

But adding bad sites and apps to your blocklist means less of your budgets go to fraudsters and criminals. Better yet, when you start running campaigns with an allow-list or inclusion list, you can avoid 90% of the fraud. There are simply too many millions of fake sites and fake mobile apps to block using a block list.

Oh, and another obvious area to save costs is to eliminate the legacy fraud verification vendors that didn't protect you from fraud, waste, and brand safety issues. Be sure to ask them what portion of your ads they actually measured with a javascript tag, instead of assumed to be "fraud free" without even being measured. A static .gif pixel tracker cannot measure anything -- it is used for counting (based on how many times it was loaded). And if you're sufficiently pissed at the legacy fraud verification vendors for NOT measuring 9 in 10 ads, but still reporting only 1% IVT to you, you have every right to sue them for not delivering what they promised to you in writing. If they didn't measure it, they should not charge you for it, right? An easy way to check is to ask your agency to pull a report with BOTH "monitored ads" and "measured impressions." The latter is the number that was actually measured with a JavaScript tag. Monitored ads is a total count, not necessarily measured. And that is what is shown by default in verification reports, not the count of actually measured impressions.

You are welcome to use FouAnalytics at no cost to overcome FOFO ("fear of finding out"). See: How to Deploy FouAnalytics Tags on Various Ad Platforms and How to Scrutinize Clicks from Programmatic Campaigns with FouAnalytics.

Save me time

When you find out the real rate of fraud, and exactly where the fraud is coming from, you can take steps. For example, when you see the fraudulent sites and apps that legacy vendors failed to detect as fraudulent, you can add those sites and apps to your block list, and clean your campaigns. It was not your fault, previously, because not only did the legacy vendors tell you there was only 1% fraud, they also failed to tell you which sites and apps were bad guys so you could block them.

Their failure to detect the bad sites and apps meant you didn't have the data with which to improve your campaigns. When you have FouAnalytics (analytics for your digital media) like you have Google Analytics for your website, you can see which bad sites and apps are chomping through your ad budgets using fraudulent techniques, including bots -- invalid traffic -- and other forms of fraud like stacked ads, pixel stuffing, auto-refreshing ad slots, forced redirects, porn popunders, etc.

Fear not, you don't need to add thousands of sites and apps to your block list. You just need to add 10 - 20 at a time -- the "worst offenders" that are eating up the largest chunks of your budget. Blocking a site or app that is eating up 10 impressions is not significant.

Above is a screen shot from the Domain App Report tab in FouAnalytics. When you have in-ad FouAnalytics tags measuring where your ads are going, you will see the top 10 bad guys listed in the "worst offenders" data grid. You will see the count of impressions and a column called "prevalence." In this specific example, the first row shows a certain site that is eating up 14% of the impressions (17,369,229 out of 124,270,585 in this time period). That is significant; and if you choose to block it, you will reduce the amount of dollars flowing to this bad actor.

This interface was built for my workflow over the years to save ME time. Now you get to use it too, to save YOU time --- by surfacing the worst offenders you should review first. You will also see all the forms of fraud pertaining to this site in the columns to the right so you can understand why it was surfaced to you in the "worst offenders" list. You can review each of the sites and apps yourself and elect to block them by checking the checkbox. When you check the checkbox, the site or app gets added to the lists above. You can then copy and paste these lists to send to your agency to block. Be sure to ask them to screen shot where and how they added the sites and apps to block. I have encountered numerous cases where the agency folks simply didn't know how to do this, because they had not been asked to do this before. Yeah, it's 2023 and this is still the case.

Make me look good

Once you have better analytics for your digital media, you can make rational optimizations, ones that you could not make before with the data given to you by the legacy fraud vendors. By taking out the worst offending sites and apps, you progressively clean your campaigns and make them better at driving real business outcomes for you. Even if we discover that campaigns have 90% fraud in them, you don't need to turn off 90% of your digital media right away (unless you want to). You can put in place a transition plan and progressively clean your campaigns at a pace that is palatable to you, your boss, and your board.

You can then show them you are having a direct impact on the bottom line. For example, money that didn't need to be spent buying fake ad impressions and fake clicks can be saved, and flow directly through to the profit line. Dispensing with fraud verification, prebid blocking and other useless adtech services can also be cost savings.

Finally, having the right analytics, knowing how to use it, and using it regularly will also make you look good. How? In one example, the marketer drove a 6X improvement in business outcomes (sign ups for paid subscriptions). This came from a 3X increase in the RATE of sign ups (more ads shown to humans) and a 2X improvement in COST per subscriber (i.e. cost got cut in half, because the massive waste of ads shown to bots was cut out).

So what?

I know you know what. Before your boss or your board comes to ask you "how long have you know about ad fraud and why have we kept paying for it?" you can take steps to upgrade your tools. When you can see better, you can do better. You have analytics for your website, why haven't you had analytics for your digital ads? Legacy fraud verification vendors were just CTB (check the box) but they will no longer CYA (cover your a**). In fact, they are a liability because their failure to detect the fraud that was there led you to not take the appropriate action to reduce fraud. It was not your fault that you were limited by them in the past. But you have a way out now. In fact you have a "stay out of jail entirely" card to play with FouAnalytics. Besides, who wouldn't want to use something that saves you money, saves you time, AND makes you look good?

You are welcome to use FouAnalytics at no cost -- i.e. free -- so you can "see Fou yourself." Just message me.

Happy Sunday Y'all!