Ad Fraud: The Digital Advertising Industry’s Biggest Battle Yet to Win

That’s the estimated amount of money advertisers are expected to lose this year because of ad fraud.

While ad platforms are getting better at detecting such fraud, fraudsters are also coming up with more innovative, hard-to-detect ways to commit fraud. These days, fraudsters employ a variety of sophisticated techniques to fool advertisers.

Even modern ad fraud bots have become sophisticated. These bots have authentic user/device IDs, that can perform complex actions, and mimic human behavior almost perfectly. Entire communities of cyber criminals, backed by handsome development budgets, are engaged in ad fraud.

Using Google Ad Traffic Blocking is a good way to protect your ad campaigns, but it is not enough.

Let’s understand how:

Loopholes In the Google Ad Traffic Blocking

Google Ad Traffic Blocking allows you to block ad traffic from specific sources. This means you can block traffic from known sources of fraudulent traffic. While this sounds great in theory, this strategy has a number of problems:

– The list of sources of fraudulent traffic is constantly growing. Nearly half of the traffic on the web is bot traffic, and bad bots account for 39% of this bot traffic. As you’re reading this, there are hundreds of fraudulent websites being created. By the time you add new websites to your ad traffic blocking list, new ones will already be in operation.

– Many advertisers depend on their Google Analytics data to detect sources of fraudulent traffic and use Google ad blocking to prevent their ads from appearing on these websites. This isn’t a sustainable strategy. It is almost like you are paying the ad platform to learn about fraudulent traffic sources. Depending on the size of your ad budget, such a strategy can potentially cost you thousands of dollars every month.

– The combination of Google Analytics and Google Ad Traffic Blocking only works for sites using simple bots. It is much more difficult to manually detect the activity of sophisticated bots.