Articles and Research

For many on the supply side, the onboarding of new publisher partners includes an initial vetting of their traffic, looking for impression fraud and invalid traffic. This quality check is important in the prevention of ad fraud making its way into a platform or exchange. But once publishers are given the green light to sell inventory, are they ever inspected again? They should be.

Within the programmatic ad industry, supply side revenue (that of networks, SSPs and exchanges) is directly connected to the amount of traffic that passes through their space, as they get a percentage of the CPM on every transaction. This correlation between traffic volume and revenue is hard to ignore and it has also helped to drive an unfounded fear among some sell siders that any reduction of volume will negatively affect the bottom line. Not true.

In the battle against ad fraud, some of the basic recommendations to protect ad dollars within the programmatic space is to employ a block list so that ads don’t get served from IP addresses associated with fraudulent activity. This recommendation has been stressed to both the demand and supply sides of the programmatic ecosystem. Here are five questions to ask about a block list before applying it to your space:

Ad fraud continues to make headlines and move to the forefront of the industry's mind—or at least it should—as spending increases within the programmatic landscape. While it’s important to acknowledge the ad fraud problem and look for ways to combat it, there are a few reoccurring misconceptions about it. Here are five of them:  

A brand is more than just a logo and a slogan, it’s a reputation and a carefully crafted culture. As programmatic spending increases, so too has the concern over where ads get placed. Marketers don’t want their creative appearing on contradictory or embarrassing websites that could potentially tarnish the brands they’ve worked so hard to build. Enter brand safety monitoring.

Pre-bid fraud solution enables users to block ad fraud in real time.

Fraudlogix, an online advertising fraud detection firm that specializes in fraud solutions for the industry’s “wholesalers” (ad networks, ad exchanges, SSPs and DSPs), is introducing IP Block List, a pre-bid fraud subscription service that allows users to block ad fraud in real time.

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.