Ad Fraud Archives - Integral Ad Science

End-to-End Ad Measurement is Super Valuable — Here’s Why

IAS Team — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that measurement is a crucial component of successful advertising campaigns. Advertisers and publishers alike have been measuring digital impressions for decades. But ad measurement has evolved significantly since its inception, and impressions aren’t the only metric that matter anymore.

So how comprehensive and actionable is the measurement you’re relying on today?

The right measurement tactics enable you to ensure greater brand protection and impact on valuable media inventory — especially in environments like the open web, where your display and video campaigns are highly visible. In this blog post, we’ll explore why end-to-end ad measurement is invaluable and how it can transform your advertising strategy.

The key ingredients of end-to-end ad measurement

Despite its simplicity in nature, end-to-end ad measurement on the open web can get complicated fast. The advertising ecosystem is complex and busy, with consumers tuning in every day to different formats via multiple streaming platforms, and often in very different contexts. To navigate this complexity, end-to-end measurement must cover several key areas.

Viewability

For advertising to make an impact, it has to be viewed —not just served. Ensuring that your digital ads have the opportunity to be seen by consumers, wherever they are, is critical. All digital ads — desktop, mobile, in-app, browser, display, video — have unique requirements that need to be met when measuring for viewability.

As advertising becomes more sophisticated, brands want to not only prove ROI but also transact on viewability, and that’s why it’s more important than ever to have full-flight data on whether or not an ad was seen. IAS provides coverage for display and video placements across desktop, mobile web, and mobile app, and provides actionable data that reports viewability, fraud, and overall user experience.

Measuring viewability is paramount, so IAS ensures it doesn’t come at the cost of efficiency. We deliver the same set of data to both buyers and sellers so that no time is wasted on reconciliation. Additionally, our predictive data makes it possible for brands to target the most viewable ads available, all before ever placing a bid. Our pre-bid video and display viewability segments are easily accessible within the world’s largest demand-side platforms.

Ad Fraud

There are more than 5.35 billion internet users worldwide using the internet everyday. But unfortunately, sometimes digital ads are delivered to anything but a real person.

Advertising fraud is a persistent threat in the digital space, draining resources and diminishing campaign effectiveness. According to our 19th Edition Media Quality Report, campaigns that are not optimized for fraud tended to encounter levels of fraud up to 14 times higher than those optimized against ad fraud. In fact, 8.4% of non-optimized ad campaign impressions were served to anything but a real human in the second half of 2023.

End-to-end ad fraud measurement can significantly increase transparency to help identify fraudulent inventory. By leveraging ad fraud metrics, marketers can measure the amount of activity their ads are generating from fraudsters, and subsequently use this data to optimize ad spend toward real users via IAS pre-bid solutions. Access to actionable invalid traffic data throughout the entire campaign is key to effectively allocating ad spend and confidently ensuring your ads have an opportunity to reach real users and make an impact.

Brand Safety and Suitability

Brand safety must go beyond the binary. Black and white brand safety and suitability measurement can unnecessarily limit scale and doesn’t give the context marketers need to understand the effectiveness of their ads.

That’s why it’s critical for marketers to build on the power of brand safety with the innovation of suitability. IAS contextual targeting technology reviews all elements on a given page and takes additional steps beyond URL analysis to understand the meaning of the content. Before a bid is even placed, IAS’s predictive science pre-screens pages to filter out content that isn’t suitable for a given brand. Only IAS gets to the true meaning of the content, so marketers can ensure they’re aligning campaigns with consumers who will connect the most with their brand.

End-to-end brand safety and suitability measurement and protection gives marketers the most accurate picture of the content near their ads, and provides brands with the opportunity to safeguard without limiting scale.

4 steps to improve your brand’s performance on the open web

Leverage measurement partners who follow industry standards for viewability
Keep up with benchmarks for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand safety and suitability
Employ AI-powered prevention solutions for invalid traffic and brand safety and suitability to ensure your ads are seen by real people in the right context
Reallocate ad spend based on viewability, invalid traffic, and brand safety and suitability data

Drive superior results today with IAS

By incorporating end-to-end measurement into your digital advertising strategy, you can protect your brand, optimize your ad spend, and achieve superior results. Reach out to an IAS representative today to learn how we can help you harness the full potential of your advertising campaigns.

The post End-to-End Ad Measurement is Super Valuable — Here’s Why appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Effectively Validate Media Quality Across the Microsoft Advertising Network

IAS Team — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Safeguard and scale with Viewabilty, Invalid Traffic, and Brand Safety & Suitability Measurement across Microsoft

Delivering your ads to the right places and driving impact to the right audience has never been easy — until now. Starting today, IAS and Microsoft are joining forces to provide new levels of transparency into ad performance across the Microsoft Advertising Network including Audience Ads and Microsoft Invest.*

Through this expanded collaboration, you can access Viewability, Invalid Traffic, and Brand Safety & Suitability measurement to ensure that your Microsoft ads are running adjacent to brand safe and suitable content and engaging users.

With IAS's Microsoft Advertising Network Measurement, you can:

Validate your campaigns with measurement using trusted third-party reporting and analysis for Audience Ads
Access actionable insights such as viewability, time in view, % completed, invalid traffic rate, and brand safety pass and fail rate
See a holistic view of performance across desktop, mobile web, and in-app for display, video, native, and CTV campaigns

Effectively validate your media quality and maximize engagement with real users across the Microsoft Advertising Network. To get started, download the one sheet and reach out to an IAS representative.

*Powered by Xandr

The post Effectively Validate Media Quality Across the Microsoft Advertising Network appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

How Marketers Can Detect and Avoid Made For Advertising Sites

IAS Team — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:00:57 +0000

Have you ever clicked on a link to an article with a clickbait-y headline such as “Shocking secrets of the pharaohs!” or “You won’t believe how much these actors make!” and been redirected to a page littered with ads? If so, you’ve visited a made-for-advertising (MFA) site.

MFA sites have existed since the advent of programmatic advertising and have historically been referred to as “clickbait sites” or “ad farms.” Unlike premium ad-supported sites with quality journalism, MFA sites exist solely to serve ads. MFA sites are low quality sites with a terrible user experience, which reflects poorly upon the brands that advertise on them. Research from Jounce Media and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has shown that advertising on MFA sites doesn’t drive meaningful campaign results, like conversions and brand lift, and is a waste of ad spend.

Biometric research conducted by IAS, The Ripple Effect, highlights the risk for brands advertising on low quality sites:

81% of U.S. consumers find it annoying when a brand appears next to low quality content
Of those consumers, 52% feel less favorably toward a brand that does this
62% will stop using the brand altogether if its ads appear adjacent to low quality content

Why do MFA sites exist?

Simply put, MFA sites make their publishers a lot of money. MFA publishers practice arbitrage advertising—they place ads across content recommendation platforms on a pay-per-click basis and monetize the resulting traffic by serving a ton of ads. It’s a very simple and effective model, and completely legal.

MFA site operators, for the most part, are not purchasing bot traffic. Real people are visiting these sites, so their model is not driven by invalid traffic. Many MFA sites use plagiarized or AI-generated content instead to engage with users.

How have MFA sites avoided detection?

MFA sites have flown under the radar for years because they’re highly optimized and purpose-built to perform well against traditional ad verification metrics—especially viewability. MFA sites tend to be fraud-free, brand safe, contextually relevant, and, given they stack ad placements above-the-fold, have above average viewability rates.

In an effort to avoid detection, MFA sites take unusual steps not taken by premium publishers. For example, the look-and-feel of the site can be completely different to a visitor depending on how they got to the site. If the visitor was directed to the site after clicking on a link promoted by a content recommendation platform, they’ll see the site littered with ads. However, if the user visits the site directly, they will see very few ads, and sometimes no ads on the homepage. MFA publishers do this to pass audits when partners inspect the quality of their sites.

MFA sites are not operated in silos, they are operated in large, coordinated networks. A publisher will own many MFA sites and will rotate traffic across their sites. They will also share content across these sites. Once the publisher notices a decrease in bidding activity on a given site (due to buyers putting the site on exclusion lists), they will move traffic to another site. They may even temporarily shut down the site and relaunch it again in the future.

It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.

What are the qualities and attributes of MFA sites?

The ANA, along with the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), recently published a list of characteristics associated with MFA sites:

High ad-to-content ratio
- Usually at least twice the Internet average, e.g., ad-to-content ratio of more than 30% for desktop
Rapidly auto-refreshing ad placements
- Numerous refreshing banner ads
- Autoplay video ads flood the site
- Slide shows forcing visitors to click through multiple pages to access content, with multiple ads
High percentage of paid traffic sourcing
- MFA publishers often have little-to-no organic audience and are instead highly dependent on visits sourced from clickbait ads that run on social networks, content recommendations platforms, and even on the websites of reputable publishers. Buying paid traffic is the primary cost driver of operating an MFA business. Overcoming paid traffic acquisition costs requires MFA publishers to engage in aggressive monetization practices and arbitrage
Generic content (non-editorial or templated, low-quality content)
- Often syndicated, dated and non-unique (articles regurgitated)
Usually poorly designed, templated website designs

How can IAS help?

IAS’s new MFA measurement product leverages AI to identify MFA sites. It supports the definition above, and goes beyond this list of characteristics to effectively identify MFA sites.

The IAS MFA product completed alpha testing in early October 2023, and is available now as a beta measurement offering for select customers. General availability is expected to expand to all customers in early 2024.

For more information, check out our press release and reach out to your IAS representative.

The post How Marketers Can Detect and Avoid Made For Advertising Sites appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Verify intrinsic in-game buys in Frameplay’s gaming ecosystem

IAS Team — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:59:00 +0000

Advertise confidently in gaming environments with IAS-accredited Invalid Traffic measurement

Your ad spend is valuable in every environment. When it comes to gaming, rest easy knowing your buys are more transparent than ever before in Frameplay’s gaming ecosystem with industry-leading Invalid Traffic (IVT) measurement from IAS.

Through this integration, marketers can verify that their valuable intrinsic in-game ad placements are seen by real gamers with precise impression counts in a fraud-free environment.

With IAS invalid traffic (IVT) measurement and impression counts in Frameplay’s gaming ecosystem, marketers get:

Global measurement for a holistic view of intrinsic in-game media buys
Trusted, third party reporting with daily reporting in the IAS Signal UI
Comprehensive coverage across formats and environments

Advertise in Frameplay’s network of premium games with confidence that your campaigns are engaging real gamers and driving results. Download the one sheet now to get started.

IAS is all-in on gaming. Learn more about what gamers want from intrinsic in-game ads here and check out IAS’s gaming capabilities on the Insider blog.

The post Verify intrinsic in-game buys in Frameplay’s gaming ecosystem appeared first on Integral Ad Science.