Navigating Mobile Marketing: Understanding and Addressing Fraud – A DataDrivify’s Perspective

Before embarking on your mobile marketing journey, you must acknowledge a crucial reality: fraud. You will likely need to expend some of your marketing budget to identify and mitigate fraud within your network portfolio. The proliferation of fraud techniques makes it incredibly challenging for advertisers to wholly avoid fraudulent activity. However, with comprehensive checks in place, seasoned advertisers can minimize the impact of fraud, even if they depend on Networks, Affiliates, or Publishers for traffic generation.

Why Does Fraud Occur?

Fraud isn’t new to the digital marketing space. It has been a part of the ecosystem since the early 2000s, with its scope intensifying in recent years due to increased marketing budgets. This surge has made the fraud industry a lucrative option for easy money.

An advertiser’s understanding of the ecosystem has matured over time. Nevertheless, many continue to spend substantial marketing dollars, primarily focusing on performance metrics without scrutinizing how these numbers are achieved. Such advertisers, who emphasize performance metrics without considering the methods employed to reach these numbers, are prime targets for fraudsters.

This becomes particularly critical if they do not continuously innovate more stringent ways to confirm performance and tighten their data security. Without these safeguards, advertisers may fall victim to fraudsters.

Fraudsters: The Market & Motivation

The digital advertising market is booming, and with a low entry barrier, we’re witnessing a surge in Ad Networks and publishers. These entities can provide advertisers with superficial metrics, earning a substantial profit in the process. They take advantage of advertisers’ limited understanding of the market ecosystem, making short-term gains through fraudulent activity.

Ad Networks and publishers engaging in fraud can be split into two categories: those who voluntarily participate in fraud for quick profit and those who are compelled to partner with fraudulent publishers to meet growing demand and remain competitive in the industry.

Fraud: A Recurring Issue on a New Platform

Fraud isn’t new to the digital marketing landscape. We’ve seen it in the early 2000s with Display Networks and Affiliates driving fraudulent orders. Email Marketing has seen its share of database fraud and fake metrics. Even pop-up traffic, irrelevant keyword traffic, and unwanted geos have all been a part of the fraud spectrum.

Today, Mobile Marketing fraud has increased, with a significant volume of people talking about it and beginning to understand how the ecosystem functions.

The Players in Fraudulent Activity

Fraud can originate from Ad Networks or Publishers. Networks have visibility into their traffic sources, and if fraud is occurring without their knowledge, they can identify and analyze the problematic publishers. However, Networks may indulge in fraudulent activities by collaborating with fraudulent publishers and employing various techniques like running simulators, click fraud, geo fraud, and blending high incent traffic.

Publishers, particularly small gaming and utility apps, have mastered various fraudulent activities. Their methods range from click spam, click injection, capturing GAID (Google Advertising ID) of an organic event, and attributing it to themselves, among other innovative techniques.

The Forms of Fraud

Fraud can manifest in many ways, such as fake installs, fraudulent transactions, inventory fraud, pricing fraud, and others. It is essential to understand these forms to prevent them effectively.

Types of Fraud

Fraud types include attribution fraud, rebrokering, asynchronous clicks, fingerprinting, incent traffic disguised as premium, click fraud, APK stores fraud, geolocation fraud, and hexadecimal Android ID fraud.

Mitigating Fraud

At DataDrivify, we understand that no advertiser can completely eliminate fraud when working with third-party networks. On average, every advertiser might experience 20% to 30% fraud in their activity. Thus, a few checks can

be implemented to reduce its impact. These are some preventive measures that can be incorporated:

1. Network Partner Transparency: Collaborate with select partners who provide information about their operation, inventory source, live Ads on users’ devices, SUB ID, and granular level data.

2. User Funnel and Data Analytics: Monitor and analyze the entire user funnel from install to transaction and user retention. Check retention by source in your MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner) and internal system to validate the authenticity of the installs.

3. Identify Industry Fraud and Evaluate Impact: Stay updated with industry fraud trends and analyze whether your system has addressed those loopholes. Check if fraud is happening using those methods in your portfolio.

4. Stringent or Specific Targets: Establish targets that can be validated using internal data. For instance, use a CPS (Cost Per Sale) model based on First Transaction and validate it using internal data. This ensures the transaction is complete and no return or cancellation has been made.

5. Collaborate with Fraud Detection Tools or Customize MMP: Use fraud detection tools that provide detailed insights into the activity and can be integrated with the MMP or tracking tool you use. Additionally, most MMPs are working on reducing fraud activity and are coming up with innovative methods or technology to tackle it.

In conclusion, DataDrivify understands the complexity of mobile marketing fraud and the importance of maintaining a reliable marketing ecosystem. While we accept that completely eradicating fraud might not be possible, we strongly believe in adopting a proactive approach and continuous innovation to minimize its impact on your marketing efforts