As mobile marketing takes up a bigger share of advertising campaigns, marketers should be wary of mobile fraudsters.
In the webinar, “Detecting and Managing Mobile Fraud,” Susan Bidel, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc., on Monday discussed the extent of mobile advertising fraud and how marketers can protect themselves.
Bidel defines fraud in digital advertising as reaping rewards through deployment of technologies that mislead advertisers about where their ads are running, and who or what is clicking and interacting with those ads.
Bidel provided data from PureClick, a fraud detection software company, which in a recent test displayed a message box after consumers hit a display ad on a smartphone. The message box asked the consumer if she wanted to continue and see the content of the ad or if she wanted to go back. 8% of consumers confirmed they wanted to see the ad, and 24% of the clicks were deemed fraudulent by PureClick.
That kind of fraud is making marketers hesitant to advertise on mobile devices, Bidel says.
“We all need to work together to fight fraud,” Bidel says. “I don’t believe we will eradicate it completely, but it won’t be at the 24% of activity.”
Marketers should monitor traffic patterns from their mobile ads. Even if marketers know the publishers hosting their ads are legitimate, make sure the traffic to those sites is genuine, she says. Marketers should question traffic patterns that are too similar, such as all the clicks coming from the same operating system, same ZIP code or same time of day.
“Humans are very variable,” Bidel says. “Sameness is a clue.”
Marketers should also make sure they are buying ads from reputable sources. For example, only Google can sell advertising units on YouTube, and any other exchange offering those ad units is committing fraud, Bidel says.
Criminals also try to fool marketers through location manipulation, such as promising to deliver an advertisement outside a certain store when they only deliver it to consumers in that ZIP code. Marketers also should beware of ad stacking, which also occurs on desktops, in which ads are stacked so a click is attributed to multiple ads when only the top ad is viewed.
Follow mobile business journalist April Dahlquist, associate editor, mobile, at Internet Retailer, at @MobileStrat360A.
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