Ad Fraud Archives - Integral Ad Science

IAS Partners with Lunio to Provide Click Fraud Measurement and Protection

IAS Team — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 11:55:00 +0000

First-to-market partnership detects invalid traffic throughout the entire media buying cycle

Fraudulent clicks don’t convert. When it comes to money wasted on clicks generated by bots, it’s not just ad budgets that are squandered — the opportunity for revenue is lost too. In fact, it’s estimated that $205 billion in revenue opportunities will be lost to invalid traffic (IVT) this year alone.

Starting today, IAS is teaming up with Lunio in a first-to-market partnership to provide post-click measurement and protection across search, social, and display networks. This partnership builds on IAS’s existing ad fraud detection and mitigation capabilities, giving marketers the most comprehensive IVT protection in the industry.

“IAS is dedicated to safeguarding brands throughout the entire media buying cycle,” said Jim Egan, SVP, Business Development at IAS. “Our partnership with Lunio makes us the first media measurement and optimization platform to provide insight into click fraud, empowering marketers with the most actionable invalid traffic data.”

In partnership with Lunio, marketers will receive reliable, transparent post-click IVT analytics and traffic protection capabilities, with key benefits including:

Transparency: Understand how IVT is affecting accounts and spot where junk visits are damaging campaign performance
Empowerment: Proactively analyze and optimize paid media investments using insights from click data and traffic quality signals that aren’t available elsewhere
Quality: Increase the quality of ad traffic by leveraging insights to prevent invalid and junk traffic from wasting resources and skewing data — for laser-focused targeting of real prospects

“This partnership marks a crucial step forward in providing marketers with the most effective invalid and junk traffic data possible” said Neil Andrew, CEO at Lunio. “We’re proud to partner with IAS in a joint commitment to giving marketers reliable analytics and protection that drive quality and — most importantly — business results.”

IAS’s existing ad fraud detection and mitigation products stop more bots without over-blocking real humans by relying on a unique, three-pillar approach powered by unmatched scale and machine learning to provide the most accurate detection and prevention.

To learn more, download the one sheet and reach out to an IAS representative.

The post IAS Partners with Lunio to Provide Click Fraud Measurement and Protection appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Media Quality Report: 19th Edition

IAS Team — Tue, 07 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Industry-leading benchmarks for superior media quality

The digital landscape continues to evolve at a rapid rate, offering marketers endless opportunities for innovation. But in an era where change is the only constant, it’s critical for marketers to know if their campaigns are keeping up with the pace of digital media.

The 19th edition of the Media Quality Report (MQR) is here to serve as a trustworthy tool for marketers worldwide to benchmark campaign success. This year’s report offers marketers an in-depth look into global media quality data, key trends shaping the digital landscape in 2024, and country-level metrics for a more enriched way to make data-driven decisions.

Dive into this year’s key trends, with highlights including:

Fraud rates for unprotected campaigns were 14x higher than campaigns protected against fraud
Time-in-view hit a new low in H2 2023
Brand risk rose in the Americas as election cycles began

As the gold standard in digital media quality, the MQR arms marketers with actionable insights that are key to forging an innovative, impactful, and safer digital future.

Download the report today to access IAS’s industry-leading global benchmarks and drive superior results.

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How to Prevent Mobile Ad Fraud

IAS Team — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Protect your advertising spend from fraudsters in mobile apps

Millions of consumers across the globe engage with mobile apps everyday. Whether it’s for social media, convenience, productivity, or pure entertainment, mobile apps have become an essential part of people’s daily lives — and marketers have followed suit. But fraud has become a billion dollar problem across mobile, with marketers losing nearly $35 billion in mobile app ad spend to fraud globally in 2023.

With the increasing threat of in-app fraud, marketers across the globe are adopting sophisticated anti-fraud tools to defend against these covert operations and protect their advertising budgets.

What is mobile app ad fraud?

Mobile app ad fraud refers to any kind of deceptive practice that manipulates advertising in mobile apps to generate revenue or unfairly disrupt competitors. This form of fraud rears its ugly head in multiple ways, including app spoofing, out of context ad rendering, and geo masking, among others. The goal? These fraudsters aim to generate fake ad impressions and steal revenue from digital advertisers, publishers, or supply partners. This malpractice exploits one of the most active channels in digital advertising, undermining its credibility and financial potential.

Mobile app ad fraud is a major challenge for marketers. This issue not only drains advertising budgets but also risks damaging brand reputation and jeopardizes potential collaborations with publishers and platforms. Brands in particular face the threat of wasted ad spend and diminished trust among consumers, impacting their brand equity.

What are the common types of ad fraud within apps?

There are many common forms of mobile app fraud — here are some of the most prevalent:

App Spoofing: App spoofing is a deceptive practice in mobile ad fraud where an app’s identity is falsely represented. It often involves lesser-known apps presenting themselves as popular ones to command higher ad rates, rogue exchanges listing well-known apps to inflate inventory value, and mislabeling mobile ads as premium CTV ads. App spoofing causes advertisers to pay premium rates for misrepresented ad placements and erodes trust throughout the supply chain.
Out of Context Ad Rendering: This form of fraud occurs when a mobile app displays ads while not in active use or visible to the user, disrupting device functionality and leading to unintentional clicks. This practice degrades the user experience and wastes ad spend, violating guidelines that require ads to be non-intrusive and easily dismissible.
Geo Masking: This is a deceptive tactic in mobile ad fraud where fraudsters disguise their geographic location to simulate traffic from high-value markets. By doing so, they can command higher ad rates or meet specific campaign requirements targeted at certain regions. Geo masking misleads advertisers about the actual origin of ad engagement, leading to inaccurate targeting and wasted ad spend.
Device Farm Exploitation: Device farms are setups that may use virtual machine (VM) devices or even real people to simulate ad interactions, like clicks and views. These farms generate artificial ad traffic and falsely inflate engagement metrics, which leads advertisers to unknowingly pay for fake engagement.

How can I prevent ad fraud within my apps?

Protection on mobile app campaigns is essential — after all, the average consumer spends a third of their day browsing mobile apps, making it one of the most prolific channels for advertising. To combat fraud and prevent fraudsters from re-entering apps, media quality partners are key. In fact, IAS recently found that campaigns that are not optimized for fraud tend to encounter levels of fraud up to 16x higher than those that are optimized against ad fraud.

Media quality partners, like IAS, employ teams of specialized analysts, engineers, and data scientists to address ad fraud from every angle. Their expertise ensures that ad spend is allocated correctly, enhancing campaign safety and effectiveness. Using the right measurement solutions to detect fraud and optimization solutions to prevent it can ensure safety, security, and confidence when driving your brand’s message across mobile apps.

How IAS can help

As a leader in detecting and mitigating fraud in mobile campaigns, IAS knows how important mobile protection is. IAS uses AI and machine learning to identify potential fraud behavior and uncommon patterns in marketers’ campaigns. Plus, IAS’s ad fraud detection and mitigation system is designed to effectively stop more bots compared to competitors, while ensuring that real human interactions are never blocked.

With mobile usage growing each year, standardized mobile measurement for Invalid Traffic and Viewability is crucial. That’s why IAS provides independent, trusted verification at scale on mobile and in-app. Our solutions include Brand Safety and Suitability, verification for insight into Viewability, optimization for in-app efficiency, and unmatched anti-fraud products that will boost real engagement from real users.

Here’s a look at the in-app ad fraud tools that IAS offers:

Comprehensive coverage across programmatic buys with measurement and optimization support to ensure Viewability, IVT, and Brand Safety
Customizable reporting, including Brand Safety with content risk categories and inclusion/exclusion lists
Single tag solution that supports monitoring and blocking for both display and video

Drive superior results in your mobile app campaigns with IAS’s industry-leading suite of ad fraud products. Learn more about how IAS fights and prevents fraud, and contact us to stop fraud in your mobile app campaigns today.

The post How to Prevent Mobile Ad Fraud appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Fraud in Generative AI: A deep dive into how Gen AI affects marketers

IAS Team — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The IAS Threat Lab evaluates the impact of generative AI in digital advertising

Generative AI has been commanding conversations in digital media lately. While generative AI isn’t a new concept, it has recently caught fire due to the prevalence and effectiveness of chatbot AI platforms, like ChatGPT. The onslaught of this technology has moved several tech giants to create their own version of an AI chatbot — and has inspired malware authors and fraudsters to do the same.

The IAS Threat Lab evaluated the effects of generative AI on ad fraud, how it could speed up the prominence of ad fraud in the digital advertising industry, and how we continue to protect marketers from these emerging threats.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is artificial intelligence that’s able to create text, images, audio, video, or other media. This technology works by learning the patterns of information or data that it ingests, and generating new, similar information.

Let’s take a look at some ways marketers could be fooled by fraud powered by generative AI.

Fake websites and falsified user agent data

Generative AI can create realistic-looking websites filled with fake content, including articles, reviews, product listings, and more. It’s also possible to have AI ingest legitimate content from outside sources and have it launder the content into seemingly original articles and news stories. These sites can then be used to host fraudulent ads and generate fake impressions.

It doesn’t stop there. Fraudsters can leverage generative AI to create websites that closely mimic legitimate publishers, fooling marketers into thinking they’re placing their ads on reputable platforms. While not strictly fraudulent, this tactic can also be leveraged in Made-For-Advertising (MFA) sites in which a website with seemingly legitimate content overruns the majority of viewable space with advertisements.

MFA sites can be created at scale by an individual with the help of generative AI. Due to the positive viewability and brand safety metrics of placing ads on these domains, these sites can fool marketers into believing they’re generating quality impressions — but in reality, these ad placements are low quality and a waste of ad spend. In fact, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) reports that MFA websites represent a shocking 21% of impressions.

Generative AI can also falsify impressions by creating fake user agent strings, making it appear as if impressions are coming from legitimate devices and browsers. Fraudsters use AI models trained on vast datasets of real user agent data to generate plausible but entirely fake user agent strings. The data is then inserted into requests made by automated bots or scripts and allows for fraud at scale with the intention to bypass behavioral fraud detection.

Fraudulent user profiles and testimonials

Generative AI can create highly detailed user profiles. These fake profiles are often complete with demographic information, interests, and online behaviors with the intention of mimicking genuine user interactivity. Fake profiles often come hand-in-hand with AI-driven bots that can simulate user behavior, like mouse movements and ad interactions, to make fraudulent activity look natural.

Along with fake profiles, generative AI can be used to produce large volumes of positive reviews and testimonials for products or services, artificially boosting popularity and trustworthiness. This type of activity is seen consistently on major retail domains, video streaming platforms, and financial coverage websites. They tend to be relatively obvious by having overly detailed information in their comment or review, and having an outlandish amount of “likes” that have been generated by bots.

How can you prevent AI-based ad fraud?

IAS’s ad fraud detection tools can help marketers mitigate the impacts of AI-based fraud. With advanced analytical, behavioral, and deterministic modeling techniques, IAS can detect and stop fraudulent activity powered by automation and AI.

In addition to fraud detection products, marketers should verify the authenticity of website content and reviews to identify potential fraud. Plus, marketers should conduct thorough vetting of publishers to ensure they’re legitimate, along with regular audits of ad campaigns, websites, and user engagement patterns to identify and address suspicious activity.

Marketers can also leverage IAS’s AI-driven MFA detection and avoidance product. Our MFA site technology improves transparency into advertiser campaign quality, identifies where spend is being allocated, and informs optimizations to minimize waste on MFA sites so marketers can take back control of their media quality and cut down on wasted spend.

Don’t let your brand get caught up in the blurry lines of what’s real and what’s not on the internet. Contact an IAS representative today to find out how to fight fraud and drive superior results.

The post Fraud in Generative AI: A deep dive into how Gen AI affects marketers 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.

What is Ad Fraud?

IAS Team — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 18:27:33 +0000

What marketers need to know about the schemes infiltrating ad spend

In a perfect world, every ad impression would be presented to, and viewed by, an actual human that is potentially interested in a specific product or service. Unfortunately, the programmatic ad space is rife with abuse and malicious actors perpetrating a plethora of fraud schemes preventing this from happening. This leads to wasted time, effort, and ad spend. It’s more important than ever to actively protect your brand from sneaky fraudsters, given the difficulty distinguishing between a human and a bot impression.

What exactly is ad fraud?

Ad fraud refers to any invalid impression resulting from a deliberate activity that prevents the proper delivery of ads to real people at the right time and place. This results in a financial loss for the advertiser and/or publisher.

Fraudsters fool advertising platforms with invalid traffic, clicks, impressions, and conversions via bots (or botnets) and other advanced methods, preventing ad content from being delivered to legitimate users. They are then rewarded with significant financial gain due to advertisers paying for impressions that were never actually seen by humans. In addition to the financial loss, brand reputation can also be harmed or diminished.

As bot traffic is clearly not the intended audience for advertisements, it’s typically classified as Invalid Traffic, or IVT. While IAS tracks many different types of IVT, there are two major types overall:

General Invalid Traffic (GIVT): Traffic generated by benign crawlers or other non-malicious bots. Easily identified and filtered through basic means.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT): Malicious and evasive traffic designed to circumvent protections around ad display. It’s difficult to identify and track, and requires advanced analytics, data science techniques, or direct human intervention.

The reality is that fraudsters continue to employ ever more sophisticated tactics to defraud the programmatic ad ecosystem and steal money from marketers — and those tactics are expected to continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

No market is immune to ad fraud, and it spreads across all major platforms including open web, CTV, and mobile. Some major types of ad fraud include domain spoofing, device spoofing, app spoofing, ad stacking, and more.

The true cost of ad fraud

In 2022, estimated programmatic ad fraud losses topped $80 billion USD. With programmatic ad spend expected to increase exponentially year over year, projected ad fraud losses could easily cross $100 billion USD in 2023. Combine this with significant damage to brand reputation, and you have a recipe for disaster without protection at your side.

In addition to this, ad fraud operations are commonly used as a profitable foundation for major malicious actors’ infrastructure such as DDoS botnets, ransomware, and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. The stakes are higher than ever when it comes to disrupting these operations and maintaining brand standing.

The silver lining? IAS can help.

Detecting and combating ad fraud is an ongoing challenge — but IAS is here to help. While most solutions rely solely on an automated check to detect any invalid traffic, IAS’s unique, three-pillar approach is powered by unmatched scale and machine learning, providing the most accurate detection and prevention.

The IAS three-pillar approach uses:

Rules-based detection with automated rule checks to identify anomalous behavior patterns
AI/Machine learning that uses big data to detect any hidden, uncommon patterns
The IAS Threat Lab employs malware analysis and reverse engineering to uncover emerging threats

Paired with the filtering abilities of IAS Threat Lab, automated rule-based detection, and the power of AI and machine learning, IAS’s ad fraud product suite ensures that no fraud goes undetected to protect peace of mind while scrolling.

The post What is Ad Fraud? appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

IAS & Anzu launch first-to-market in-game measurement solution

Kelly Kauffmann — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 12:01:00 +0000

Monitor your 3D intrinsic in-game buys with Viewability and Invalid Traffic measurement

Did you know that 56% of gamers say they spend more than eight hours per week playing video games? Not only is the gaming audience growing — they’re also highly engaged. With such a captivated audience, in-game advertising opportunities are more plentiful than ever before — and the need to monitor media transparency has never been more important.

IAS is bringing its industry-leading Viewability and Invalid Traffic measurement in a first-to-market partnership with Anzu to complex 3D environments. Through this solution, advertisers can access best-in-class third party measurement to gain transparency and verify that their Anzu in-game advertisements reach real people.

Here’s what you get:

Innovative, global 2D and intrinsic 3D in-game measurement coverage for a holistic view of your media buys
Comprehensive coverage for display and video ad formats across all campaign types and environments including mobile, PC, and console
Trusted, third-party daily reporting with key metrics including viewability, time-in-view, percent completed, invalid traffic rate, and more

Make data-driven marketing decisions with 3D intrinsic in-game media quality measurement. Download the one sheet now to get started.

The post IAS & Anzu launch first-to-market in-game measurement solution appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

Industry-leading Viewability and Invalid Traffic verification on Facebook and Instagram Reels

Kelly Kauffmann — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Get enhanced transparency into your media buys on Meta

Understand your mark on the internet’s most influential platforms. Starting today, you can gain granular transparency into your media buys on Meta platforms with Viewability and Invalid Traffic (IVT) reporting on our newest coverage — Facebook and Instagram Reels.

With industry-leading Viewability and IVT reporting, you get:

MRC-accredited, visual third-party measurement and reporting on Facebook and Instagram
Insights down to the creative level to drive performance and validate your campaigns
Consistent measurement across global media buys to understand performance

Meta platforms supporting IAS’s Viewability and IVT measurement include:

NEW Facebook & Instagram Reels
Facebook & Instagram Feeds Facebook & Instagram In-Stream
Facebook & Instagram Stories
Facebook Watch
Facebook Audience Network, plus more

Know that your campaigns are engaging real users and driving outcomes with IAS’s easy-to-use visual and creative-level reporting. Download the one sheet now to get started.

The post Industry-leading Viewability and Invalid Traffic verification on Facebook and Instagram Reels appeared first on Integral Ad Science.

IAS and Roku launch best-in-class invalid traffic protection for CTV

Kelly Kauffmann — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:56:15 +0000

Connected TV (CTV) has experienced a meteoric rise in adoption. Linear is taking a backseat among consumers – and marketers are following suit. In fact, CTV ad spending has followed a steep incline this decade, reaching $26 billion by the end of this year and nearly $44 billion by 2026.

But there’s a harsh truth that comes with the rise of any format. As CTV dominates, fraud will follow. Marketers are on the lookout for increased media quality risks from the fragmented nature of CTV, and they’re right to do so – device spoofing and other fraud tactics are real risks as bad actors make their way to the format.

IAS and Roku defend ad spend

That’s why, starting today, IAS pre-bid fraud segments are available for marketers on Roku’s ad platform, OneView. Plus, IAS is now offering support for Roku’s Advertising Watermark – available only on authentic Roku devices.

Together, IAS and Roku are solidifying their vigorous efforts to stop fraud before it starts. With granular post-bid measurement and pre-bid optimization filters available on OneView, marketers can better understand their investments and ensure they bid only on valid inventory across Roku devices.

Roku’s innovative Advertising Watermark product fights device spoofing, deters bad actors, and validates the authenticity of ads that originate on the Roku platform. IAS is proud to support this effort, helping to give marketers the confidence and reassurance that their ads run exactly as they should on real Roku devices.

The critical impact of third party reporting on CTV

Third party protection is the most reliable way to defeat fraudsters and advertise with confidence on CTV. IAS and Roku give marketers independent protection with end-to-end invalid traffic coverage of ads purchased through OneView. This protection goes beyond just TV screens, providing coverage anywhere consumers stream – including mobile and desktop – so marketers can easily apply IAS’s IVT protection to entire campaigns on OneView.

Plus, IAS’s campaign optimization capabilities seamlessly match post-bid measurement and pre-bid filtering for improved ad effectiveness and coverage from every stage of every CTV campaign.

Beat bad actors and reach real users

Ad-supported CTV inventory is expanding at breakneck speed, and two-thirds of CTV buyers agree that fraud will grow in tandem.

Marketers have the power to beat bad actors on CTV. Starting today, digital marketers can now use the industry’s most actionable data to advertise with confidence that their ads are reaching real users on real Roku streaming devices.

The post IAS and Roku launch best-in-class invalid traffic protection for CTV appeared first on Integral Ad Science.