First experience with Digital Ad Fraud

Story of a timeless Digital Ad fraud technique that is happening for last 20 years & expected to happen for next 10 years.

Let’s start with Why?

"Read more History," said one of my favorite writers.

My initial thought upon hearing this was ‘The world is changing faster than ever. What is cutting-edge today will become absolute in a few years. So, why should we read something that is 50 or even 100 years old?’

His reasoning was simple. You must read history solely because the world is changing faster than ever. You can pick up things from the past that are true today as well. If something is true for 100 years, it will most likely be true for the next 100 years too.

When did it happen?

My first experience with Digital Ad Fraud was a decade back. There were no ad fraud detection companies then. There are so many companies in that domain today. Yet this particular fraud continues to happen even today. When I read about it, I learned it was also happening even twenty years back.

So I presume it will continue to happen for the next 10-20 years too, which makes it worth sharing with you all.

This was the period when Google Ads for App Marketing was almost non-existent.

On Facebook, you have to run 100s of campaigns with all the possible targeting cuts to find the combination that works so that we can scale them. But it was not scalable beyond a point.

Ad Networks were the only way to grow the app install campaign to a meaningful scale. Hence it was the golden age for Ad networks.

Nobody knows where the traffic is coming from. But everyone sees the installs in the dashboard. So they were happy.

First contact with fraud

I used to manage more than fifty ad networks at that point. You won't know which ad network scaleup when. You have to keep asking them why the campaigns are not scaling every day. One day it might scale.

When you run an App acquisition campaign, you can track clicks & installs from the ad networks in the Mobile Measurement Platform(MMP). You can also check the down-the-funnel events there. But when you are missioned to scale up the installs, you hardly care about the down-the-funnel event. We live to fight for the conversion event another day.

Once, we added a new partner from Europe. And they started scaling up from the day-1. Truly it was a digital miracle. When I checked the data in the dashboard, we saw a massive amount of clicks and a decent amount of installs.

When I presented to our CEO that week, I proudly said that while the install scaleup is moderate, we are getting a massive amount of clicks at a meagre cost. Compared to Google & Facebook, the CPC of ad networks was 1/100th. It was a great deal on paper.

I concluded the presentation by saying this.

“While the campaign hadn’t scaled up to the level of clicks, it eventually will, as we are generating huge brand engagement.”

Little did I know what was happening behind those clicks then.

Click Spamming

Click Spamming fraud is one of the oldest digital ad frauds. In theory, the process is simple.

Step 1: Fraudsters own an app available on almost all devices.

Think of a launcher app or memory cleaning app. Ten years back, they were present on literally all mobile devices.

Step 2: You generate fake clicks from all devices at regular intervals.

Step 3: Find the list of apps that are frequently installed on those devices and reach out to the app owner to start the campaign

Step 4: After closing the deal with the App owner, use the campaign URL while generating the fake click.

Now all the App installs (Organic & Paid) will get attributed to the fake clicks. This is clicks spamming fraud in a nutshell.

Because of this simplicity, it isn't easy to detect this fraud with 100% accuracy. All the methods available (even now) are heuristics based. I will give an interesting example.

A few years back, we were using a well-known fraud detection tool for our App campaign. For one particular country, we were nudging the mobile web user to install the App to do transactions. We used an interstitial banner with the MMP campaign link and sent users to the playstore.

We got a decent amount of installs from this. However, the fraud detection tool reported that 28% of the installs from this campaign were fraudulent. Almost similar to the average of other ad networks. When we asked them about it, they had no clue.

I am not blaming our partner. It is just the way their heuristics system was built. These systems are the same even now.

Fightback

So how should we tackle this? We should also fall back to the old ways.

After the click, the funnel's next step is usually a Landing page. For the App, it’s the Playstore visit. Fortunately, you can get his data in the Google search console. It is available in Store Analytics -> Store listing visitors.

Whenever you start a campaign with Ad Network, check the click numbers in the MMP dashboard and correlate them with the store listing visitors’ numbers.

If the latter is not even 50% of the former, you are experiencing click-spamming fraud.

This is not a proactive solution. Yet it is better than others.

That’s it for this week's issue.

See you next week.

PS: Human-crafted words. No AI involved in writing this Newsletter.