Need For Ad Fraud Protection For Digital Marketing Agencies

Himanshu Nagrecha Mar 21, 2023

With 692 million active internet users in the country, according to a report by IAMAI (The Internet and Mobile Association of India), social networking has sparked a revolution in digital marketing. In fact, digital marketing has evolved as the most preferred means of advertising for businesses. Since modern customers spend more time and money on social networking sites, digital marketing provides firms with the opportunity to reach audiences more effectively in order to expand their brand and increase revenue.

Although digital marketing has offered a wealth of opportunities for businesses, it has also brought into the picture some serious threats. In fact, as newer ways of advertising have developed, the audience has multiplied, which has further prompted firms to shift their advertising budgets to digital. The surge in spending has created opportunities for scammers to take advantage of the brand. In that context, ad fraud has arisen as a critical issue confronting businesses today. It can take many different forms, but they all have the same purpose: to redirect your advertising budget by bringing in false traffic or non-genuine customers for your campaign.

Furthermore, it has hindered the ability of digital marketing agencies to provide accurate services to brands. Hence, it has become vital for the agencies to incorporate long-term ad fraud prevention solutions with the goal of improving ad campaign transparency, pursuing cost savings by lowering fraudulent clicks and seeking greater client satisfaction.

Modern day challenges digital marketing agencies face today

The ultimate objective of every digital marketing agency is to ensure maximum reach to their clients and generate considerable revenue in the process. Though digital marketing has offered them the opportunity to do so, it has also exposed them to several unscrupulous practices. One of the most prevalent fraud schemes that digital marketing agencies frequently encounter today is clicking fraud.

This kind of fraud typically targets pay-per-click advertisements and deceives the ad platform into thinking that actual users are interacting with the content, increasing the popularity of the website. Agencies end up paying more money to position advertisements on that website as a result, but in actuality, those expenditures are directed to fraudsters.

In addition, cookie stuffing is another significant issue that digital marketing agencies frequently experience. Cookies are tiny pieces of code that track user behaviour and provides information regarding the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. To alter the attribution and payment scheme, scammers introduce cookies from websites other than the one the user initially visited. This, as a result, poses a severe challenge for digital marketing agencies and limits their ability to offer their clients the finest services possible.

Ad fraud protection: Need of the hour for digital marketing agencies

Optimising ad spending: Invalid traffic generated from fake clicks or conversions is known to reduce advertising budgets since the data gathered is inaccurate and infested. So, the ultimate result would be misleading if the agencies decide to optimise the spending based on the erroneous data acquired. Here ad fraud protection comes into play as it helps in verifying and preventing invalid traffic from disrupting the ad budget, thereby enabling a clean data ecosystem and making optimisation more effective.

Boost campaign ROI: Offering clients a real-time full-funnel solution to run ad campaigns in order to maximise return has become essential for digital marketing agencies. And ad fraud protection solutions allow them to correctly evaluate ad placement, delivery and interaction. According to a recent Forrester-Oracle study, ad fraud protection enabled brands to increase ROI by 287 per cent and recoup USD 6.3 million in advertising costs by reducing illegitimate visitors. Overall, ad fraud protection allows the agencies to unlock budget into valid traffic and real users with the intention of driving growth.

Saves time: Given the advancements in technology, ad frauds have also grown multifold; as a result, detecting ad frauds has become a challenging task. Scammers are now able to mimic real world user behaviour to mislead many detection technologies, making it difficult for the human eye to spot them. However, thanks to automated ad fraud protection solutions, it has become easy to flag any suspicious activity supported by improved accuracy. Apart from that, client media expenditure is typically dispersed among a variety of channels, each of which has its own set of measuring tools, making it time-consuming to keep track of them all. But with the help of multi-point channel ad fraud prevention digital marketing companies can now easily get a unified perspective of performance and quality across the client's whole advertising operation permeated across various channels. This, as a result, ends up saving time and provides consistency.

Ad fraud protection: An effective growth tool

There is no denying the fact that the concept of marketing has undergone a significant change, with digital marketing taking center stage. Despite the numerous benefits that digital marketing has provided for agencies, it has also brought a number of hazards their way, with ad fraud at the top of the list. With recessions becoming a harsh reality and cost-cutting measures being expansively employed, it has become essential for digital marketing agencies to effectively streamline their clients' brand spending. This is where ad fraud prevention comes into play because it enables the agencies to precisely identify ad frauds, redirect the ad budget to real users and enhance the brand's ad spend ROI, thereby resulting in brand growth.