Ad fraud isn’t the concern for just the advertisers. It’s the concern for all of us in the adtech ecosystem. As a publisher, you might be relatively new to ad fraud technology and that’s why we compiled this list. You can use the list as a starting point for your research on ad fraud detection companies.
Ad fraud is not just about numbers. Over the last few years, ad fraudsters have developed themselves into an unbeatable force that can crunch every technology that prevents their mission of spoiling the internet. For instance, tag evasion.
1 in 5 ad-serving websites is visited exclusively by fraud bots.
– The Verge.
While Marketers and Publishers hope to have a solution like Blockchain to solve the problem, the immaturity of the concept wouldn’t let the researcher take a big leap. It takes time.
On the other hand, consortiums such as IAB Tech Lab, DigiTrust (IAB acquired DigiTrust recently) and MRC are fighting to establish a pure digital ad chain. Ads.txt, Viewability Metrics, etc. are one of the many moves aimed at making digital advertising clean and charm.
However, publishers don’t need to wait for blockchain or an AI solution to lift the bar. For now, publishers can partner with ad fraud detection software in the market and stabilize their ad revenue. Advertisers (either programmatic or direct) are willing to pay for quality inventory with human traffic and clicks. Not the other way around.
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Why Publishers Should Care About Ad Fraud?
The deal advertisers make with a publisher is simple and straightforward.
“You give me X impressions/Clicks, I return you $Y”
What made the whole deal complex is the technologies and the scale at which deals are being made. But let’s not dwell on that topic. As the ecosystem becomes complex, ad fraudsters and scammers have used the opportunity to hide in the bush.
Now, advertisers have to filter out non-human impressions and clicks as they have zero ROI with them. To do that, they partner with ad fraud detection companies and weed out the publishers who don’t provide real traffic and clicks. In order to stay out of the weeded list, you should know the ad fraud companies and run a test with them.
In this piece, we’re going list the ad fraud companies who are well-known in the market in no particular order.
Best Ad Fraud Solutions For Publishers
1. White Ops
“White Ops Protects the Internet”
White Ops was founded in 2012 and has been experiencing steady growth as a ‘bot fighting’ company. It has partnered with the largest adtech platforms such as the TradeDesk, Videology, and several fortune 100 financial companies.
Other than adtech, it has diversified use cases including finance, healthcare, and Education. For adtech, White Ops provides,
I) FraudSensor – A JavaScript-based detection tag that provides visibility into placements and sources of bot traffic.
Features: Real-time alerts, extensive reporting, and campaign overview.
II) MediaGuard – An API-based service that uses FraudSensor’s detection and machine learning to precisely predict the bots at scale.
Features: Post-Serve Analysis, Custom APIs, and SSO technology.
2. Confiant
Confiant (formerly known as ClarityAd Inc) is one of the growing ad fraud prevention vendors in the adtech ecosystem. Unlike White Ops, Confiant focuses only on the digital ad industry offering products to help both publishers and advertisers.
Interestingly, Confiant can be used to safeguard your programmatic/non-programmatic ad selling. The product can detect and block forced ad redirects, in-banner video ads, cookie stuffing, pop-ups/pop-unders, and more. And, in case you’re wondering, it is compatible with the header bidding setup.
Note: We’ve worked with Confiant and the results are impressive.
3. DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify has its proprietary platform dubbed as ‘DV Pinnacle’, to ensure viewable, fraud-free, and brand safety ads for media buyers. DoubleVerify claims its platform is the industry’s first unified service and performance platform.
DV Pinnacle can provide insightful metrics for delivered ads including whether the ads are viewable, seen by humans, and in-geo.
You can use DV Pinnacle to close direct deals with premium brands as you are proving the inventories are viewable, gain human impressions, and are safe — at one go. Besides, it helps you to optimize your CMPs and improve partnerships with the buy-side.
Features: Viewability, Brand Safeness, In-Geo, and Campaign Management.
4. IAS (Integral Ad Science)
Founded in 2009, IAS provides a stream of optimization and verification products for publishers, advertisers, brands, and agencies. It has been working with big names such as Adobe, AOL, and DoubleClick Bid Manager by Google.
You can deliver verified inventory to advertisers while constantly increasing yield, optimizing revenue, and decreasing IVT.
Features: Real-time Solution, Reduces Impression Waste, and Easier Implementation.
5. Pixalate
Pixalate is capable of preventing 15 types of fraud and monitors over 50 million URLs. It has partnered with well-known adtech vendors including OpenX, AdRoll, and Centro.
It offers an API to process and detect non-human traffic in real-time. And, a buyer can divert his traffic from blacklisted IPs and fraudulent domains.
Besides, it maintains a seller trust index that lists the best programmatic sell-siders in order. The score is determined by combining various metrics such as viewability, domain masking, ads.txt file quality, etc.
Features: Blacklisted and URLs, API for real-time decision making, and Trust Index.
6. Forensiq (Acquired by Impact)
Forensiq offers a sophisticated fraud detection software that uses machine learning to identify device hijacking, botnet (invalid traffic), and also lets you run user behavior clustering analysis. It works with both the sell-side and the buy-side. Forensiq can detect and protect fraud in the pre-bid and post-buy stages as well.
Impact acquired Forensiq back in 2016, but it still offers Forensiq products separately for publishers.
Features: Full-Funnel Fraud Detection, Detects both SIVT & GIVT to keep publishers safe from sophisticated botnets.
Should I Invest in Ad Fraud Detection Tools?
The answer highly depends on your website and revenue goals. For instance, if you’re a mid-market publisher with 80% Viewability and can close a decent deal with brands, you might need a few more metrics (such as fraud-free, brand safeness) to improve your CPMs and also to partner with premium advertisers.
Needless to say, advertisers should be utilizing ad fraud prevention technologies to get a satisfactory ROI. This, in turn, forces publishers to offer quality, human impressions. If you can offer them quality impressions without the help of ad fraud detection companies, you’re good to hit the road alone.
One more thing — if you’re using a monetization partner, then you should check with them first. They might be leveraging an in-house ad fraud detection tech or partnered with a third-party tool to deal with invalid traffic issues. So, rather than doing it from scratch, you can let the partner handle it.
