Ad fraud isn’t becoming more prevalent — the fraudsters are just getting slicker. Join this VB Live event to learn how to make a game plan to define benchmarks, detect and manage fraud, and work with your partners to circle the wagons against the fraudsters.
Approximately 2,300 apps are being launched across both of the app stores every single day. And approximately 2,000 of those are not actually legitimate apps at all; they’re just clones with ad fraud built in. People just trying to win the app store optimization lottery and make 50 or $60,000 on advertising before Apple or Google find out.
And the stakeholder it impacts? “Everybody is connected to everyone,” says Tal Nissenson, VP of client success at Taptica. “If something affects the advertiser, then it will affect the publishers and the vendors and everyone in the ecosystem. We’re all connected together, so the whole ecosystem is shaking.”
Advertisers are too often pouring money into a hole while legitimate publishers are stuck in the middle between trying to provide good quality traffic while also being suspects. But MMPs (mobile measurement partners), crucial to providing attribution, are the fulcrum in the middle, offering up the data that directs the advertiser how much to pay for each install, and in fact guides entire advertising strategies.
“If they see that one channel is overperforming, they will move all the budget there, Nissenson explains. “They will do product updates and base the whole product strategy on what they’re seeing from the MMPs data.”
MMPs have access to the entire cycle of consumer behavior, from click to post-install events, and with concerns around mobile attribution fraud growing, they’ve taken on themselves to essentially help solve the fraud problem, providing tools and education on top of their attribution technology role.
But the solution to the problem is a huge dose of transparency across the industry, with every part of the ecosystem collaborating to detect and manage fraud going forward.
The first step, Nissenson says, is to choose a trusted partner: the one that’s been there for a while, that has technology, that has the knowledge and experience in fighting fraud and in the industry in general, then work together to tackle it.
“Knowledge is power,” says Nissenson. “The more data points we can look at together, the smarter we’ll be.”
On top of that, know your product, know your app, and know what kind of user behavior you expect to see.
“Anyone can look at their own results and stats and see if they make sense,” she says. “Anything that sparks something that you wouldn’t expect in terms of user behavior should be flagged for further investigation.”
Then decide on benchmarks together with your partner. But benchmarks have to continuously evolve, she warns, and it’s essential to continuously update them per new findings and that’s where, again, the shared data component is so important.
“Fraudsters are getting more and more sophisticated — it’s important to realize that,” she says. “Once the clients and the vendors update their benchmark, the fraudsters will adjust accordingly, so keep on monitoring, keep on learning, keep on knowing what’s new.”
And not least is having realistic KPIs, she explains.
“If you have unrealistic goals, for example, you’ve spent $10,000 in one day and have amazing quality, this is where the frauders get in, and this is where it’s the easiest for them to get in,” she explains. “They appeal to the rules, to the benchmarks, and to the expectations, and the advertiser is happy but short-term happy, because it’s not realistic.”
Of course, the technology to detect and combat fraud is also getting more sophisticated, and advertisers need to find partners that are able to wield it in service of swatting down the swindlers.
They’ve got the fraud prevention suites, and access to an extraordinary amount of data, she explains, so there’s a lot of sense in relying on them to detect suspicious activity, flag it, remove it, and move to prevent recurrences.
“Many other tools take the MMP data and then add analysis on top of that,” she says. “You don’t necessarily need that. There’s no need to nurture the problem by financing more and more tools and to prevent fraud.”
To learn more about each player’s role in the ecosystem, how to develop an effective ongoing game plan, and the smartest benchmarks to assign, don’t miss this VB Live event!
Don’t miss out!
You’ll learn:
- Who the stakeholders are, plus why and how each is affected
- The MMPs’ role in this ecosystem
- What fraud is and what benchmarks should be used for defining it
- How to collaborate to detect and manage fraud on an ongoing basis
- What tools are out there to fight fraud
Speakers:
- Emily Storino, Network Strategy Lead, Electronic Arts (EA)
- Grant Simmons, Head of Client Analytics, Kochava
- Tal Nissenson, VP Client Success US, Taptica
- Stewart Rogers, Analyst-at-Large, VentureBeat
- Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat
Sponsored by: Taptica
