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ARTICLE

How to Avoid Fraud: Tips from Peer39 by Sizmek

September 22, 2015 — by MediaMath    

Advertising fraud comes in many “flavors,” but ultimately, it can be grouped into two main types:

Invisible fraud, in which ads are delivered in a way so that they are nearly impossible for users to ever see, i.e., ads are essentially “invisible.” This includes fake websites and fake traffic to real websites or other illegitimate mechanisms.
Invasive fraud, where an unauthorized third-party delivers ads to a page in a way neither the advertiser nor the publisher of that page intended. This might be achieved through malware, ad injection, browser hijacking, and other means.

The prevalence of fraud in today’s complex digital ecosystem means that the first step to smarter spending is having increased awareness and education about the various ways fraud is perpetrated. This guide will help you understand the various kinds of ad fraud and how you can protect both your brand and your bottom line against it.

MAIN TYPES OF ADVERTISING FRAUD

Bot Sites and Nonhuman Traffic Bots or Botnets

What It Is: The most widely reported type of ad fraud, a bot site has one purpose: to defraud advertisers. The site owners create webpages, populate them with real content (usually falsely produced or stolen from other legitimate websites), and make them available through ad networks or exchanges that participate in real-time bidding. They then set up or hire botnets that visit the site, or infiltrate legitimate users’ computers and run bot scripts in the background. This in turn generates ad impressions that enter the auction environment and are ultimately purchased by advertisers.

How We Can Help: Target away from Quality: Fraud: Bot Sites Nonhuman Traffic

Spoofing

What It Is: When a site poses as another website in order to attract ads, it is called “spoofing.” Buyers believe they are bidding on a particular site or domain, and may even be applying blacklists, contextual targeting, and brand safety filters, but end up finding URLs in their delivery reports that should have been avoided.

How We Can Help: We can see through to the final landing page of any bid request and detect whether a spoofed URL is trying to secure your advertising dollars. To avoid these sites, your account manager will create a new custom category and remove this type of fraudulent bid request from the pool of biddable inventory.

Malware

What It Is: There is another class of fraud that has nothing to do with the source of traffic or the actual page visited, but the manner in which ads appeared on that page in the first place. This type of fraud, usually executed by a malicious piece of software on a user’s machine, injects ads where they don’t belong. Malware is responsible for ads on ad-free sites like Wikipedia or ads that are displayed in odd, new configurations. These ads got there because malware on a browser injected fraudulent ad tags onto the page before it loaded.

How We Can Help: Target away from Quality: Fraud: Zero Ads

Relevance, Scale, and Fraud Protection

There are, and always will be, bad actors out there looking to defraud advertisers. The best way to mitigate fraud and waste is to stay educated and work with trusted, media-independent technology partners that empower you to spend smarter. Find out all the ways Peer39 and MediaMath can help you eliminate fraud and waste – contact your account representative for more information or with any questions you might have about fraud in the digital advertising ecosystem.

3 comments

  • Jim

    October 21, 2015 at 7:34 pm

    What did MediaMath do with all the money from the recent fraud news? hopefully they gave every penny they made to charity.

    • MediaMath

      October 23, 2015 at 3:48 pm

      Hi Jim — We continue to take fraud seriously and maintain a proactive approach to helping our clients and partners prevent it.

  • Jake White

    November 30, 2015 at 4:56 pm

    I am a student right now, and we just learned in school about different types of fraud. I liked the advice to only work with trusted media independent technology partners. As long as you have honest people in your company, you will not have to worry about any kind of fraudulent activity. Thanks for sharing this!

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