It’s one of the biggest challenges for programmatic – but how can brands protect themselves, asks Experian’s Colin Grieves.
The rise of programmatic advertising has been fairly meteoric, as brands have looked to take advantage of this new capability providing the laser-focused targeting of adverts.
Clearly, programmatic has the potential to have a massive impact, because it allows you to deliver the right message to the right person on the right device at the right time. While programmatic technologies allow brands to bid on users one at any one time, based on anonymised data about those users, one issue that is concerning many marketers at the moment is the potential risk of click fraud in programmatic advertising.
As Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has become big business, the practice of using automated scripts to mimic users’ clicks and generate revenue for a website at the advertisers’ expense, has become widespread.
These fraudulent clicks have resulted in advertisers’ campaign results being skewed at the expense of actual conversions and have become a real burden for both advertisers and advertising networks. Programmatic advertising now faces a very similar threat.
The problem is that when an advertiser buys traffic on a fraudulent site, it usually comes very cheap (impressions for 1-5p CPM) and has good click through rates (CTRs above 1%). So if you have fraud in your advertising mix, what you see as an advertiser is that for a small amount of money you get a good number of clicks. When you remove these fraudulent clicks, it can look like traffic is being bought on more expensive sites with worse click through rates, as the marketing KPIs will often go down.
Advertisers should not be fooled by this, but the question now is how should they respond to this threat? Firstly, in most cases the potential benefits of programmatic far outweigh the risks, so there is no way an advertiser should contemplate avoiding programmatic because of this risk. Instead, they must ensure that they are aware of the risks and that they’re taking steps to minimise and eventually eliminate them.
Reducing the risks
The threat from click fraud is something that the industry is well aware of and the response is already gathering pace, with the adoption of a variety of detection and prevention technologies.
These measures include blacklists (lists of which sites to avoid) or whitelists (lists which sites to accept) as well as more elaborate forms of real-time bot detection.
Utilising more engaging and expanding advertising formats that rely on more than just a click is one creative way of reducing the risk of click fraud. Viewability technology is also being employed to verify legitimate clicks – this is a clear pointer towards click fraud, as if an advert wasn’t in view, then how can there have been a click? While this method is valuable to both media buyers and advertisers, it has its limitations as not all impressions are available with viewability.
How to keep your brand safe
These measures do have an impact on reducing risk, but having good data within the organisation to ensure those responsible for programmatic have a full view of the situation, is absolutely crucial.
To gain this advantage, advertisers and media buyers should aim to partner with trusted organisations if necessary. In this context it is also important for advertisers to enrich and validate data frequently and only use trusted and reputable partners.
All the while, advertisers should also be implementing a holistic approach to combatting click fraud, using all tactics and technologies at their disposal. This should include building a white list of sites using ad verification tools and human audits (if the advertiser knows exactly which properties it wants to serve ads on) and building a blacklist of sites and cross-check it regularly, refining it during each campaign.
The level of ad verification technology that the engaged DSP, SSP and Ad Exchange are using should also be checked. Most Ad-Exchanges will have ‘audited’ inventory and you can run campaigns on this basis only. You will need to make a business decision whether the risk/reward of lower impressions improves performance overall.
Finally, advertisers must ensure that they are always aware of both CTRs and conversion rates. Click rates of more than 1% are not uncommon with the right targeting to the right audience – but it’s good practice to cross-check this against conversion rates.
Subsequently, online and offline conversions rates will give a holistic view of performance, in combination with the volume of impressions served (if the key metric is reach) and CTR (to track engagement) – conversions are much harder to fake than clicks.
Colin Grieves is general manager of Experian Digital Media
