Explained: How brands look at ways to run bad ads off the digital highway

With India becoming one of the leading digital economies of the world, advertisers have turned full swing towards the digital medium for consumer traction. However, increasing ad frauds, where advertisers are misled in terms of user traction received and where promotional expenses are misdirected, is driving down the return on their investments. 

According to the Mobile Marketing Association, although 22 per cent of mobile ad budgets are a victim of fraud, exploring new technologies or approaches to counter are not high priority for most marketers. In fact, this is a global lament; year after year, in report after report, researchers rue the low billing that scamming gets with marketers and advertisers. 

However, the needle is shifting, say digital agencies. Most advertisers agree that the actual impact of ad frauds depends on how advertising reach is measured, notes Shrenik Gandhi, co-founder, White Rivers Media. “There is a need to understand that all types of advertising cannot be measured the same way. For example, brand campaigns should be measured on qualitative metrics first and then quantitative, which is the exact opposite of (the way in which brands consider) return on investment (ROI) based ad spends,” said Gandhi. 

Ad fraud is a scam worth $1.63 billion at present and the numbers are likely to go up by 23 per cent in 2019 according to techARC Research, a firm that tracks digital advertising in the country. According to techARC Research the problem is particularly rampant in banking and fintech, entertainment and gaming and healthcare and pharmaceuticals, where the focus is on acquiring new consumers.

Blacklisting platforms or publishers, known to generate fraudulent numbers, is a way around the menace. Anand Chakravarthy, MD, Essence India suggests that for brands beginning their digital journey, it is best to stick to the top platforms from the Google and Facebook family, which have a lion's share of the advertising market in India. “The large platforms, including top OTT providers, have invested heavily in ensuring the best safety checks, so it makes sense for brands to start their journey from these and then move only if their needs are not met,” said Chakravarthy.

In 2018, Google said it identified and terminated almost one million bad advertiser accounts, nearly double the amount in 2017. Nearly 734,000 publishers and app developers were terminated from the ad network and it also took off nearly 28 million pages that violated publisher policies.

However, marketers warn that the people perpetrating fraud do not work within fixed frameworks and formulae. They are constantly evolving and advertisers and big brands have to accept the need to be nimble with their strategies. Another problem is that many advertisers want instant results from digital initiatives, which leads to them being taken for a ride by organisations providing fraudulent impressions.  

Chakravarthy points out that advertisers should only trust viewable ad impressions. Impression, sometimes called a view or an ad view, is a term that refers to the point at which an ad is viewed once by a visitor, or displayed once on a web page. The number of impressions of a particular advertisement is determined by the number of times the particular page is located and loaded. Smart advertisers are shifting from impressions served to impressions viewed, which means that ad placement and performance serve as important metrics for publishers to keep track of, in order to maximise their ad revenue.

The problem with counting impressions without taking viewability (how much time a user has spent viewing the ad) into account is that the advertiser is often paying for inventory, which isn’t being seen by real people. Viewable impressions provide a superior metric, which captures how many ads are being seen. The industry estimate is that up to 30 per cent impressions sold in India may be fraudulent.

Knowing that the ad is being seen, and understanding the target audience, allows advertisers to be able to qualitatively measure the performance of their ads. Further, as Chakravarthy says, “Trust the technology providers and opt for tools that allow advertisers to track metrics in real time. And most importantly, figure out an advertising plan based on the actual digital presence of your business.” That is the key to the power of digital.