Articles and Research

Transparency seems to be the mantra for ad fraud verification vendors and the value they’re bringing to the industry. However, marketers rarely ask for – and vendors rarely offer – information about why certain traffic is flagged as suspicious.

As far back as 1998 when I first started my career in the online advertising space, fraud was one of the industry’s biggest threats (even if many advertisers didn’t necessarily realize it). Some thought that their abysmal performance metrics were due to poor creatives, lack of detailed tracking systems or they chalked it up to a simple “that’s how internet advertising works”. With time we began to understand that ad fraud was a contributing factor to poor performance metrics. At first we didn’t have the proper understanding of it, much less the proper tools to identify it, and so the fraudsters were for the most part one step ahead in the arms race.