Don’t be silent, engage your Account Based Advertising vendor
Let’s start with the conclusion… this is a massive issue and one that B2B demand gen marketers are often not as familiar with as they should be.
Do yourself a favor, read this post and then ask your vendors what they do to help monitor, identify and measure ad fraud.
While nobody is perfect at solving this issue, only a few account-based advertising platforms do anything about it.
Estimates indicate that non-human, bot traffic can be account for as much as 50% of ad impressions, even clicks and website traffic. Believe it or not, bots can even complete form-fills… your leads may never have happened!
Ask the right questions of your provider, it’s the right starting point: The team over here at the ABM Consortium want to enable you to ask the right questions, and this is a HUGE question that you need to know the answer to…
- What are you doing to monitor and minimize the issue of ad fraud?
- What sites does it come from?
- Can I remove these publishing sites from my ad campaigns?
News: Large ad fraud ring captured
While this huge news story made just a blip on the radar of overall news, it brings to mind the need to discuss the scale of the issue.
This one group developed an army of malicious bots, called 3ve (“Eve”). The department of justice, Google and a group called White Ops found that this group of bad actors amassed:
- 1.7M infected computers they could control
- Counterfeited 10k websites
- Delivered 3-12 BILLION fake impressions per DAY
Here are the background stories: White Ops press release, Department of Justice press release.
Sizing up the industry issue
- It’s estimated that the average US consumer is subject to as many as 10,000 ad impressions per day (AMA)
- FraudLogix research identified 50% of IE and 20.5% of Chrome delivered ad impressions were “non-human” or “bot” traffic (Wall Street Journal)
- While Google and Microsoft both disputed the browser-based approach by FraudLogix, a separate study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) determined the issue to cost advertisers $7B in 2015, delivering ads that nobody will ever see. The World Federation of Advertisers estimates the fraud number to have increased to $19B in 2018. Consider this, at this scale “ad fraud could become the second largest organized crime enterprise behind the drug trade.”
- A wealth of ad fraud statistics can be found at PPC Protect…
