This is the estimated amount of money advertisers will lose this year due to Ad fraud.

While ad platforms improve their ability to detect such fraud, fraudsters develop new, difficult-to-detect methods of committing fraud. Nowadays, fraudsters use a variety of sophisticated techniques to deceive advertisers.

Even modern ad fraud bots have advanced. These bots have authentic user/device IDs, can perform complex actions, and closely resemble human behaviour. Ad fraud is carried out by entire communities of cyber criminals, supported by large development budgets.

Using Google Ad Traffic Blocking is an effective way to protect your ad campaigns, but more is needed.

Let us understand how:

Loopholes in the Google Ad Traffic Blocking

Google Ad Traffic Blocking lets you block ad traffic from specific sources. This means you can block traffic from known sources of fraudulent activity. Although this strategy appears promising, it has several drawbacks: 

  • The number of sources of fraudulent traffic is constantly increasing. Bot traffic is nearly half of all web traffic, with bad bots accounting for 39%. As you read this, hundreds of fraudulent websites are being launched. When you add new websites to your ad traffic blocking list, they will already be operational.
  • Many advertisers rely on Google Analytics data to identify fraudulent traffic sources and use Google ad blocking to keep their ads from appearing on these sites. This is not a sustainable strategy. It's almost as if you're paying the ad platform to discover fraudulent traffic sources. 
  • Depending on your ad budget, this strategy may cost thousands monthly. The combination of Google Analytics and Google Ad Traffic Blocking is only effective for sites that use simple bots. Sophisticated bots are difficult to detect manually. 
  • While Google has not revealed how it detects fraudulent clicks, many experts believe it uses IP addresses. If this is the case, fraudsters can change their IP address to avoid being included on the Google Ads exclusion list.

Long ago, marketing professionals and ad platforms realized they needed to evolve to combat ad fraud. To that end, several innovative attempts have been made in recent years.

Let's look at some of these and see if they're effective.

Methods Used by Marketers and Ad Platforms To Combat Ad Fraud

  1. txt

Ads.txt is a public text file that enables publishers to identify themselves as legitimate publishers and prevents spoofed inventory. Unfortunately, the use of Ads.txt did little to reduce ad fraud. Aside from major sellers such as Rubicon, most publishers allow other "resellers." You can find these resellers in nearly every Ads.txt file. These resellers are not required to disclose the names of the advertisers, and they also sell traffic. They could sell the same traffic to you and several other parties.

Furthermore, fraudsters have discovered numerous ways to commit fraud using Ads.txt files. The 404 bot is one of the most well-known examples of fraudsters launching entire bot networks designed to circumvent ads.txt protection.

  1. Play Protect

Google also launched Play Protect, which aimed to prevent the release of fake and malware apps on the Android Play Store. Play Protect scans applications for malware and other threats before they are available for download on the Play Store.

While this effort did prevent some apparent forms of malware and fraud on the platform, it was not particularly effective. The fact that there have been numerous cases of ad fraud on Google's Play Store and even Apple's App Store in recent years serves as evidence of this.

  1. Fake Account Prevention

Just as Google ads struggle with fraudulent publishers, social media platforms are plagued by fake accounts. The issue gained traction when the Elon Musk-Twitter deal nearly failed because Twitter (allegedly) could not disclose the true number of fake accounts on its platform.

Social media platforms claim that they routinely run checks and purge fake accounts. However, new fake accounts pop up just as quickly as old ones are removed. While it is true that creating fake accounts is relatively difficult these days, it is still easy enough to be done at a scale.

Why Is Ad Fraud Hard to Stop?

Ad fraud is difficult to prevent for a variety of reasons. For starters, successfully committing ad fraud carries significant monetary benefits. This motivation drives fraudsters to find new ways to steal advertisers' money.

Another harsh reality is that some ad platforms may allow a small percentage of fraudulent traffic to pass through, inflating numbers. After all, the advertiser is the only one who suffers financial consequences due to ad fraud.

Finally, as fraud techniques and bots advance, detecting and preventing fraud will become increasingly difficult.

So, what should advertisers do? Should they admit that they can't do anything about ad fraud?

Quite the contrary.

Just as fraudsters have dedicated teams and communities constantly looking for new ways to commit fraud, you need a team committed to preventing said fraud.

mFilterIt' ad fraud detection tool detects and prevents real-time invalid traffic. In other words, mFilterIt allows you to identify bot traffic to your ads and prevent it from having an impact, essentially saving your valuable ad budget. Our tool detects and prevents ad fraud using AI, machine learning, and data science.

Conclusion

Ad fraud constantly evolves, making it extremely difficult to detect and prevent. Combating ad fraud is not impossible. Advertisers must go beyond traditional methods to survive in this ever-changing digital ecosystem dominated by malicious elements such as bots. Advertisers can use an advanced ad fraud solution to ensure that sophisticated bots do not sneak under their radar by pretending to be legitimate human traffic.