Ad Fraudsters will Take up to 10 Percent of the Campaign Dollars
It has become a routine for us to go through ad fraud stories in the digital advertising industry. And, we’re covering one for the third consecutive week. You might be wondering is it normal or the ad fraudsters are actually on the sky lately.
Well, to be frank, it’s a bit of both. As we all know, Q4 is where the ad campaign will get a boost from the advertisers and hence, ad fraudsters would also try to get the most.
But let’s just complete the story we’re supposed to. At the beginning of this year, Meetrics reported that UK ad viewability is no longer behind the others and it rose 15%. However, the ad fraud problem seems to be massive in the UK.
As per source, about 10 percent or £1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) of the digital ad spend in the UK will be lost to ad fraud this year.
“Ultimately, it’s a black-and-white issue. Fraud is a crime, and it’s a global industry problem. There’s only one starting point, which is zero tolerance.”
– Harry Harcus, Managing Director of UK and Pan-regional at Xaxis
The digital ad spend is forecasted to reach £13.24 billion ($17.05 billion) in 2018, thus making 68.8% of the total ad spend in the region. But with the current rate of ad fraud and brand-safety concerns, publishers still struggle to discern the worth of their original content and genuine audience from the rest.
What’s next?
Of course, it isn’t just a problem for UK publishers. Juniper Research says that ad fraudsters will steal $19 billion globally in 2018. Though Ads.txt prevents the ad fraud up to some extent, we need to take steps before its too late.
The Battle Against the Walled Gardens
We agree that ‘walled gardens’ is the second-most used term of adtech. Obviously, it’s no surprise to see the initiatives like unified log-in and IDs taking up stance. In fact, German publishers are poised to devise an EU-wide IDs to hold against the duopoly.
More recently, The Trade Desk, an adtech company has released its very own Unified ID solution for the ecosystem.
What’s in it?
As with every ID-based solution, Unified ID aims to eliminate the cookie syncing process and drive the industry towards a strong log in based solution. The solution is open to all the vendors and publishers as per the product page and it even listed some promising numbers from OpenX, Lotame, etc.
Particularly, Sharethrough boasts that the solution has improved their match rate by 21%. And, that’s a big uplift considering the level of adoption in the industry.
What about the Advertising ID Consortium, then?
Advertising ID Consortium framed to develop a neutral industry-wide solution is still in its infancy. If you’re wondering what will happen to it, as the member of the consortium is now offering a separate ID-based solution, Tim Sims, SVP of Inventory Partnership at the company has an answer.
“Its partnership is still in place and that the aim of the three initiatives described above was to rationalize the number of IDs on offer, not converge on a single one.”
Takeaway:
Facebook has been criticized (and sued) for messing up the video metrics. While everyone was aware of the face of the story, journalists and publishers have been talking about the heart. One of the key arguments goes around the influence of Facebook on video adoption rate.
Similarly, we might need a push to accelerate our progress on ID-based solution. We believe more ID-based solutions will attract more participants (adoption rate will be higher). And, it might be the push we needed to chip away the market cap of the duopoly.
Amazon faces a problem of its own making
This might look like a continuity of our previous roundup and in fact, it is. The problem was clear and it still is persisting for most of the advertisers.
‘Amazon needs to be user-friendly’
Why you should care about Amazon? It’s simple. You can save yourself by avoiding platforms (SSPs or Ad Exchanges) which has the same issues.
– Backend
Without a surprise, advertisers are very confused about the backend of the ad platform. Digiday reported that buyers are complaining about the time it takes to execute and make changes to the ad campaigns on Amazon.
“Right now, it absolutely takes more time to get to the data and push through changes on Amazon than on the platforms of its competitors.”
360i, VP of E-commerce, Will Margaritis
Some are also worried about the redundancy of data. One advertiser who spoke to Digiday said there are different data citing the same campaign and tracking the same metrics.
– Support Issues
No one wants to spend a boatload of ad dollars on a platform just to experiment what works and what doesn’t. And, Amazon is leading the advertisers to that route. Unlike Facebook or Google, you couldn’t see a lot of case studies from diversified organizations to predict what worked and how to start.
Takeaway:
Not just Amazon, every platform trying to reach the mass audience will experience the same issues. Publishers should stay proactive to decide the next moves. For instance, partnering up with a responsive and user-friendly SSP would save you hours and the platform will attract more advertisers too.
Clique – Getting on the right foot?
If you follow our roundup, you should’ve come across two-part series where we detailed how premium publishers like ESPN, Quartz, etc. are developing their own ad products to capture the buyers’ attention.
But, Clique has proved that you don’t need to be so premium to get the right advertisers into your ring.
The lifestyle brand media company which owns ‘who what wear’ started to utilize the audience data from the early stage itself. Who what wear helped Tacori to design and sell products based on the insights from the user data.
“They’re interested in the scope of data we have.”
– Hillary Kerr, Co-Founder, Clique Brands.
Interestingly, publishers like Buzzfeed and Popsugar offered help to create the right products and marketing campaigns before. The difference is, Clique is starting early and we believe it’s the right move.
Takeaway:
About.com, one of the largest publishers of the open internet become Dotdash after identifying the way to cater their audience. You don’t need to have 50M+ page views to make the decision and improve UX or revenue. The best way is to look at the data and understand what readers are trying to convey.
At Automatad, we help publishers to monetize better without hampering the user experience. Our products are live across hundreds of publishers, earning them incremental ad revenue with every passing second. You can request a free audit to get an estimated revenue uplift today.
