Expert Opinion

Profit. That’s the main goal of every business. Amongst all advertising solutions, pay-per-click advertising is considered highly lucrative to achieve this goal. But new ad fraud techniques being discovered each day, such as click farms, are costing advertisers around the globe billions of dollars. Click farms are wreaking havoc in the digital world, duping innocent marketers and forcing vulnerable farmers to work in poor conditions. Thanks to human interference, click farms outsmart even the most sophisticated bot detection solutions. These farms could be why you cannot meet your goals despite hitting your KPIs. Understanding Click Farms Managed by human-run fraud organizations, click farms exploit large numbers of low-wage workers from developing countries. The job of these workers demands clicking not on a few but thousands of online paid ads, social media posts, or PPC ads. Workers in click farms click on ads without intending to convert and add empty impressions to the metrics. The fraudsters often go as far as visiting the sites, filling out the form, authorizing application installations, or making a (fake) purchase. Click fraud activity artificially inflates the number of clicks and impressions, draining your advertising budget and increasing the click farm’s revenue in the process. Click farms also make it difficult for marketers to ascertain a campaign’s true performance. The fake impressions, likes, and clicks can make a post or campaign appear more popular than it is, leading to false engagement numbers, thus the said challenge. These numbers also lead to the spreading of misleading information among consumers. Besides, since these farms are managed by humans and not bots, click fraud detection has become more challenging. An Overview of the Click Farm Operations Primarily, click farms are focused on three major aspects of digital advertising solutions. Social Media Platforms: Occurring on all social media platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, click farms not only increase the number of impressions and clicks in just a few days but also artificially boost posts. PPC: With PPC advertising, advertisers pay for clicks. Click farms are used to drain ad budgets by producing fraudulent clicks on ads. Website Traffic: Ad publishers often employ PPC farms to inflate their traffic numbers. This can help them make their websites appear as lucrative and real estate. Types of Click Farms Three major types of click farms are running in developing countries, like India, China, Bangladesh, Philippines, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Human-based These are run by organizations where owners employ individuals to generate traffic and increase engagement metrics. Bot-based These are similar to human-based. The only difference is the number of people engaged in the operation is less. More bots are employed to achieve the same results. Mixed As the name suggests, this type of click farm is a combination of both. Some individuals are employed to manually generate revenue for the fraud organizations, while others are hired to control bots and other click fraud software. Impact of Click Farms on Advertisers In 2022, the cost of digital advertising fraud, including click farms, reached a staggering $81 billion, expected to reach $100 billion by the end of 2023. For every $3 advertisers spend on digital ads, $1 is lost in some form of ad fraud. The financial implications of click fraud on advertisers are certainly a great deal. But it doesn’t just end there. Advertisers are impacted in more ways than one. Decreased return on investment (ROI) due to inflated metrics CPI, cost per impression, is a metric that advertisers use to gauge an ad campaign’s effectiveness. Since click farms aimlessly click on paid ads, it artificially inflates the CPI metrics, making it challenging for advertisers to verify their target audience. The ads do not reach the targeted users and spread false information among advertisers about their cost per impression. Click farms also hamper CPC (cost-per-click) metrics. The increasing number of fake clicks adulterates the number of genuine clicks. Furthermore, this fraud leads to a false increase in the cost of each click in the bidding, increasing the cost per genuine click in the process. Consequently, advertisers are left with poor quality traffic, drained ad spend, and decreased return on investment. Erosion of trust in digital advertising platforms Paid digital advertising is often a solution businesses opt for to increase their sales. However, with the increasing number of ad fraud techniques and invalid click impressions, advertisers’ faith in these practices is shaken. This lack of trust adversely affects ad spend and brand marketing tactics. Building a mutually beneficial relationship among advertisers and platforms becomes a real challenge, distorting the broader digital advertising ecosystem. Negative effects on brand reputation One of the serious implications of ad fraud by click farms is the destruction of brand credibility. Fake clicks and impressions may make genuine customers feel deceived and lose their trust in the brand. Moreover, bot-based click farms that generate fake interactions on websites or social media platforms may degrade the user experience. Spam or excessive fake comments may make it challenging for genuine customers to navigate through the clutter of fake discussions and truly engage with the content. This frustrates the customer and negatively affects the brand’s reputation. How to Detect and Prevent Click Fraud Now, we know click farms are operated by real humans, unlike other ad fraud maneuvers that use bots. Due to their certain behavioral patterns, distinguishing between fake and real users is fairly easy. However, the same cannot be said for click farms since they mimic human behavior and patterns. To fight the rising ad fraud techniques, ad networks have their protection tools in place to identify the imposters. For instance, Google has an Ad Traffic Quality Team in place to detect and filter out invalid activity by using automatic filters, deep research, and live reviewers. To add a layer of protection, brands may deploy click fraud protection software, like mfilterIt. These tools use machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect instances of ad fraud in real-time. Some tools may even allow you to block fraud sources automatically, eradicating the room for human error. Are Click Farms Legal? Click farms

As the digital advertising landscape continues to thrive, more instances of fraud are also being highlighted. A report by ANA (Association of National Advertisers) suggested that advertisers on the platform may have been losing as much as 23% of their ad budgets to fraudulent activities. Understanding ad fraud may be the most basic yet most important step for advertisers worried about protecting their campaigns and making the most of their ad budgets. This article will help you do exactly that. In the subsequent sections, we will discuss one of the most prevalent forms of digital ad fraud, commonly known as click fraud. In a nutshell, click fraud is the term used to describe the act of clicking on advertisements with malicious intent. Most fraudsters commit click fraud to claim credit for fraudulent clicks and make a quick buck. Unfortunately, because executing click fraud is relatively simple, it is one of the most common forms of ad fraud. According to some studies, fraudulent clicks account for as much as 36% of the total clicks on display ads. The story of search ads is similarly harrowing, with some estimates saying 11% of all search ad clicks are fake. Understanding Click Fraud So how does click fraud take place? In its simplest form, click fraud is committed using click farms. These are bot-powered or human-powered establishments in developing countries where resources are relatively cheap. This bot or human labor is used to generate fraudulent clicks on advertisements. Malicious publishers, who are usually in cahoots with click farm owners, get paid for these fraudulent clicks, while the advertisers paying for the clicks get no real value from their campaigns. Since many click farms employ real human beings, their activity closely resembles genuine user behavior, flying under the radar of fraud filters used by advertising platforms. Other click farms employ networks of sophisticated bots that can replicate human activity and pass through the ad platforms’ fraud filters. Besides the obvious objective of making a quick buck, fraudsters may employ click farms for a variety of other reasons. For instance, some businesses may employ the services of a click farm to undermine the advertising efforts of their competitors. While click farms are the simplest way to execute click fraud, there are other more complex methods employed by sophisticated fraudsters. Some of the most common ones include: Crowdsourced Click Fraud: Have you ever visited a website that said something like “click these ads to support our website”? If so, you may have witnessed crowdsourced click fraud taking place. Here, the publishing website gets paid for each click on the ad, and the clicks come from genuine users. However, since the clicks are mostly done to ‘support the website’, they usually don’t have any sort of purchase intent behind them. This means the advertisers pay, and the fraudulent publishers get paid for useless clicks. Incentivised Traffic Click Fraud: In some cases, publishers offer some sort of reward to visitors or users in exchange for a click on an ad. The most common example of this can be observed in the case of smartphone games. Gaming apps incentivize users with in-game benefits in exchange for viewing or clicking on ads. Once again, the users clicking on these ads have absolutely no interest in the services or products they offer. Hence, these clicks have no value from the advertiser’s perspective, who still has to pay for them. Botnet Click Fraud: Botnets are large networks of computers infected with malware. The malware allows fraudsters to execute commands on these devices, which real users usually own. These commands, which often include visiting certain websites and clicking on ads (in other words, click fraud), are often executed without the knowledge of the owners of the devices. Hit Inflation Attacks: This is perhaps the most notorious form of click fraud. A hit inflation attack redirects users to a website they never intended to visit and clicks on the ads on that website. Before the user can do anything about this, they are redirected to the website they originally tried to visit. Now that we understand how click fraud works let us look at some obvious and some not-so-obvious ways it affects advertisers. The Impact of Click Fraud on Advertisers As you may be able to guess, click fraud impacts advertisers in multiple ways. For the sake of understanding, we have divided these into the following categories: Financial Implications Wasted ad spend is the most obvious impact of click fraud on advertisers. It is also perhaps the most serious. Wasted ad spend translates into a lower return on investment. In some instances, this may mean that the affected businesses may reduce their spending on digital advertising, or worse, they may completely put a stop to their digital advertising efforts. When this happens, the business ends up losing on two fronts. Besides losing their allocated ad spend to fraud, the company also ends up paying the opportunity cost of not continuing advertising on digital platforms. Distorted Performance Metrics A relatively less obvious impact of click fraud is the skewed ad campaign metrics it produces. Sources of click fraud often lead to an inflated click-through rate. In some cases, the biggest individual sources of ad traffic turn out to be the sources of fraudulent traffic. In such cases, the advertisers responsible for optimizing the campaign may allocate more budget to these sources of inflated traffic that are sending fraudulent traffic to their website. This may also mean that advertisers may ignore perfectly valid traffic sources that may send fewer but highly relevant prospects to their websites. Damaged Reputation and Trust Click fraud doesn’t just affect brands and advertising platforms. It also involves and impacts real users. In most cases of click fraud, genuine users are subjected to bad user experiences. When such experiences occur during their interactions with a brand, it may impact the brand’s image in the user’s mind. Click fraud also impacts the trust between advertisers and advertising platforms. Even ad platforms that may be actively trying to

Brand marketing has evolved with time. In the past, it was more of contextual targeting that was focused on spending the ad budget in purchasing the ad spaces with the relevant sites only. However, the landscape changed with programmatic advertising. The advertiser started losing control of where the ad would be placed as the focus shifted towards behavioral targeting. While the focus is on targeting the right audience, it is crucial to ensure the brand reputation. For example, if the ad for a beauty product gets placed on a website that has anti-social content, it will surely tarnish the company’s reputation. In 2017, reputed brands like AT&T and Verizon withdrew themselves from online ad purchases as their content was appearing alongside the terrorist sympathizers’ content. Considering the monetary and reputational investment involved, advertisers must implement the strategies with the utmost brand safety tools. Let us explore, in detail, the significance of brand safety and explore strategies to mitigate risks and protect brand reputation. What is Brand Safety? The measures taken to ensure that the ad is placed alongside the content that aligns with the company’s values and ethics and does not pose any risk to the brand value is termed brand safety. It, indeed, is a challenge to ensure brand safety with the availability of a myriad of social media platforms, apps, and websites where your ads can appear. The primary challenge is to ensure that the ad placement is avoided on platforms with inappropriate, offensive, or content that can be in the form of fake news, provocative content, or explicit content. However, the term brand safety is ambiguous as the approach or definition of safety may vary from brand to brand and also from product to product that is being advertised. Thus, the brand safety approach taken by different publishers also depends on brand suitability. Why is Brand Safety Important? Considering that the content of the advertisement and the placement of the advertisement as different components that have no impact on each other will be wrong. Consumers connect with brands as an implicit endorsement of the brands that it is associated with in terms of placing their ads alongside. Bad implicit may tarnish your brand image to an irreparable extent. Brand safety is vital because: Helps in building and maintaining reputation and even retaining the existing customers as the customers do associate with advertisements placed on high-quality websites and other similar platforms. Favorable or otherwise, associations affect the efficacy of digital marketing activities. Abiding by brand safety parameters affirms confidence in consumers enhancing customer loyalty and brand integrity. Abiding with data privacy and security norms, brands put themselves forward as a responsible brand showing value to customers, ensuring that the customer is never exposed to cybersecurity threats while preventing the firm from probable ad frauds. The above two points have an overall impact on ad sales and income. Evolving Digital Landscape The digital advertising landscape is continuously evolving. Such evolutions bring along opportunities and challenges alike for advertisers. The algorithms of programmatic advertising help in automating the buying and placing the ads in real-time enabling the brands to increase their ability to reach a wider audience in a limited time. Programmatic advertising is being widely accepted for its ease in targeting capabilities and efficiency, however, it also introduces the complexities in ensuring brand safety. The pace at which the transactions take place is unreal making it difficult for publishers to vet every ad placement manually increasing the possibility of getting placed alongside the unsuitable content. Effective AI brand safety tools proactively help in identifying and mitigating brand safety risks in real time. Let us explore some of the strategies to ensure Brand Safety 1. Ad Verification Exploit ad verification tools to scan the web pages and ad placement platforms to ensure they align with your brand utility and brand safety parameters before the ad is displayed. 2. Keyword Blacklisting Maintain an exhaustive list of keywords associated with inappropriate and sensitive content and blacklist them to prevent your ads getting placed in proximity to such content. 3. Contextual Targeting In contrast to keyword blacklisting, leverage contextual ad targeting to ensure that the ads are placed with favorable content. 4. Publishers Collaboration Set up clear guidelines with publishers stating clear expectations for brand safety parameters. This can be achieved by collaborating only with trusted partners that ensure ad placement is aligned with brand values. 5. Continuous monitoring and optimization: Regular monitoring and improvising on the go are the mantras to ensure success in protecting performance metrics from ad fraud and implementing brand safety norms by updating the keyword blacklisting and contextual targeting. Conclusion Brand safety is not merely a concern for the players involved in the digital advertising supply chain world but has become a necessity for everyone associated. To stay relevant in the game, brands must rely on digital channels to connect with consumers. It becomes the necessity and the moral responsibility of the brands and the publishers to ensure that the ads are placed in a congenial online environment. This can only be achieved by implementing robust brand safety strategies. Leveraging technology to your favor in identifying the complexities and addressing them in real-time is the only recourse brands and publishers have. Smart brand safety strategies not only mitigate the associated risks but also, help in building trust and transparency in the digital ecosystem. Get in touch to learn more about the Brand Safety.

Imagine your sales pipeline, like a bustling highway filled with potential customers moving at high speed. Here’s the catch – not all vehicles running on the highway are the same. Some are sleek sports cars ready to race towards conversion, while others are clunky old junk barely chugging along. The challenge is how do you identify? Streamline expressway of success with effective lead optimization. Transform your sales pipeline with quality lead visits and validation with lead scoring. When it comes to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion every second counts and every lead needs to be checked for quality. Optimize your sales efforts by setting your priorities right and working only on quality leads. The competition is fierce to get customer attention, marketing and sales need to optimize their strategies for lead optimization. Do not waste your time on unqualified or low-quality leads! Let’s explore how you can achieve maximized efficiency and effectiveness with lead optimization How to improve Return on Investments (ROI) with Lead optimization Wasting resources and time on unqualified or low-quality can have a significant impact on your ROI. It eats up valuable time of the sales team leading to increased costs and draining the call center bandwidth. Monitoring the quality of leads with the visit lead validation process enables businesses to prioritize and channel their efforts to drive conversion more effectively. Lead Validation – Three-Stage Approach To achieve the best possible result with enriching leads and intent-based lead scoring, a multi-layered approach is needed. A robust lead validation process is essential which requires clean traffic for quality leads, intent-based scoring & validation, and seamless integration. Clean Traffic & Fraud Prevention To begin with, brands must weed out invalid traffic sources and prevent fraud with invalid visits. The early elimination results in clean traffic and quality leads. Thus, you can focus your efforts on leads from valid sources with genuine potential to convert. Intent-based Visit Analysis Once you get the traffic validation done in real time followed by the lead generation process. The next stage is Lead analysis, checking the intent of the visit and the behavior of leads. The level of interest shown by the lead, time spent on the site, page visited, and action taken can help assess the quality of leads generated and the possibility of conversion. This enables brands to prioritize leads and set up strategies. Lead Scoring and Validation with CRM Integration Integration and automation of lead entry in CRM for sales to follow up is an important element of lead optimization. Various criteria such as demographic info, past behavior, engagement level, etc. can help identify high-potential leads with the help of AI/ML-based tech. Case Study Lead Optimization A major General Insurance Company Limited deployed the mFilterIt Ad fraud solution to attract clean traffic and genuine leads and improve the conversion rate. The core challenges were reducing the high cost of acquisition was high. Despite healthy ad spending, the conversion rate was low, and poor traffic from affiliates. We started with lead validation in June 2023 for Affiliate Lead Disposition Data Evaluation. Here is what we observed from June 2023 to October 2023. 8% Fraud in Valid leads! Not Fraud Leads has a 4% conversion rate compared to 1% for Fraud Leads. This 1% fraud conversion is attributed to Organic Hijacking, Repeat Users & Punched Leads. Real-time fraud detection and lead validation lead to improvement in lead quality, better conversion rate, and cost per acquisition. In another case in the BFSI sector – Poor quality of leads from affiliates was the major issue along with prioritizing leads to manage growing call center bandwidth. We started mapping leads to relevant risk scores through Lead IDs. Among high-quality marked leads – 26% were invalid, medium-quality leads marked with 31% invalid, and among low-quality leads, we identified 98% of leads being invalid. This eye-opener paved the way for better results with mFilterIt. They were able to enhance the quality of leads and prioritize sales calls more efficiently. The Conversion rate of mFilterIt was 7X more with more efficient lead scoring and optimization of leads. Along with Visit-Lead Validation with mFilterIt, they got the additional capability and got empowered with Conversion & Sales Data Feedback Loop Mechanism – This allows continuous monitoring and optimization of your lead generation strategies. The real-time data for analysis leads to more conversion and streamlining of sales data. It helps identify trends, gaps, and areas of improvement and leads to data-driven decisions. Post-back Trigger for Clean Conversions (for Affiliate Partners) – For affiliate marketing campaigns, implementing a post-back trigger mechanism can help ensure clean conversions. It also enables accurate tracking of affiliate-generated leads. Conclusion – Optimizing Your Lead Generation Strategy Lead optimization is more important than ever. With a robust lead validation process in place, you can maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. Focus your resources on high-quality leads with the highest potential for conversion. Drive better results, maximize ROI, and ultimately, accelerate the growth of your business with mFilterIt lead optimization and validation solution. Get in Touch to learn more about Lead Scoring and Validation.

Building a brand is a challenging undertaking. Besides offering something unique, one has to put significant effort towards creating a unique identity that audiences like and relate to. Protecting a brand’s reputation may well be one of the most important aspects of an effective and holistic marketing strategy. Fortunately, modern marketers are becoming increasingly aware that modern brand reputations face threats online. In a survey of brand marketers, advertising agencies, tech companies, and media providers, conducted in the last quarter of 2022, 40% expected their brand safety concerns to rise. Identifying Threats to Digital Advertising Campaigns and the Need for Brand Risk Monitoring Unfortunately, maintaining a brand reputation can sometimes be more difficult than building it. Simply being aware that there are threats out there isn’t nearly enough. Marketers must understand the ever-evolving threats to digital advertising campaigns across app, web, and programmatic ad platforms and stay proactive to protect their advertising budget and brand reputation. This article will help you do exactly that. In the upcoming sections, we will discuss the most significant risks to brand reputation today. We will also cover actionable steps to implement brand safety advertising that enables safe and sustainable growth for your brand. 3 Major Brand Risk Many factors threaten a brand’s reputation online. While some are directly influenced by the brand’s actions, there are others that most brands don’t directly control. In this section, we will discuss three of the biggest, most prevalent threats from the advertising and brand safety point of view. Ad Fraud Ad fraud can take many forms, but the basic premise remains the same- faking clicks, impressions, or downloads to drain a brand’s marketing budget. Fraudsters take credit for these fake clicks or downloads and unsuspecting advertisers end up paying for them. Estimates say that advertisers collectively lose several billion dollars to ad fraud every year. While the connection between ad fraud and the monetary damage it causes is easy to make, one may wrongly believe that ad fraud does not pose a threat to a brand’s reputation. In fact, it influences a brand’s reputation in two different ways. Adult websites and MFA (Made-for-advertising) sites are some of the biggest sources of click spamming and impression fraud. While most brands actively avoid adult websites, fraudulent publishers can fake website information and get ads published on adult websites or MFAs. This drains ad budgets with fake clicks, shows the brand’s ad to a completely irrelevant and disinterested audience, and most importantly, hurts the brand’s image by showing its ads next to adult content (more on this in the next section) or on low-quality content sites. One of the most common methods of ad fraud is exploiting rewards offered by brands to boost their app downloads. Fraudsters create thousands of fake accounts to claim said rewards and drain the advertiser’s budget. Another way this hurts the brand is by depriving real and interested users of the rewards meant for them. When this kind of fraud happens on a large scale, many users don’t get what they are promised. This can deeply hurt the brand’s image and reputation and even turn away some users for good. Unsafe Ad Placement Most everyday users on the web don’t realize that brands have little direct control over where their ads are being displayed. That’s why, when a brand’s ads appear next to objectionable or extremist content, it can cause serious damage to its reputation. One of the most famous real-world examples of the same is the Applebee’s ad controversy. CNN played Applebee’s Dancing Cowboy campaign ad in the middle of a report on the Russia-Ukraine war. The viewers did not find this acceptable, and both brands faced serious backlash. Similar situations have played out online for several brands. Infringement Attacks Infringement attacks by fraudsters pretending to be representatives of a legitimate brand are also a growing threat to modern brands’ safety. While impersonation on social media is one of the most common instances of infringement attacks, fraudsters use more sophisticated ways to commit fraud while pretending to be a brand that thousands trust. Phishing attacks and domain spoofing are just a couple of the many such tactics employed by fraudsters to scam users who trust a brand. This can cause permanent damage to a brand’s reputation. This damage isn’t just limited to those who have fallen victim to these fraudulent activities. If news breaks out, it can negatively influence the trust of thousands of existing and potential customers. How To Create a Strategy for Growth and Safety? As mentioned earlier, there are actionable steps that marketers can take to protect their brand’s reputation. Let’s look at some of them: Validate Your Ad Traffic Ad traffic validation, as the name suggests, is the process of ensuring that your ads are not falling victim to fraud. It also ensures that your ads’ clicks or impressions come from real human users, not bots or click farms. Ad traffic validation can ensure ad fraud activities do not threaten your brand’s safety. Keep A Check on Your Ad Placements Advertisers must also make efforts to ensure their ads are not being displayed next to questionable or extremist content. By placing validation tags within the ad markup, advertisers can analyze the content of the websites where their ads are being displayed. This enables the blacklisting of problematic websites and allows advertisers to maximize the impact of their campaigns without putting their brand reputation in jeopardy. Conclusion Threats to brand safety are becoming increasingly evident and there are growing concerns amid advertisers. Such threats have become so prevalent that simply building awareness of them and how to combat them can provide advertisers with a competitive advantage against unsuspecting competitors. By taking simple steps such as validating ad traffic, tracking ad placements, and instances of infringement with mFilterIt, marketers can ensure their brand reputation remains protected during its growth journey. Get in Touch to know more about the Brand Risk.

Every click and impression counts! The dynamic landscape of digital advertising requires advertisers to maintain the integrity of ad campaigns. It might seem an uphill battle to optimize performance and safeguard the ad spend but proactive monitoring and fortifying their ad campaigns can protect them from menace like click fraud and spamming threats. The burning question here is – are these efforts enough? Do they protect against ever-evolving sophisticated threats? Is it building trust and transparency along with preventing wastage of ad spending? Let’s explore! Click Integrity Monitoring to Reducing Spamming and Click Fraud Consider the scenario – You’re running a digital ad campaign targeting users in India. But, you notice a surge in clicks that seem too good to be true. If you have an efficient click validation mechanism in place, you will uncover the sinister truth – click spamming is at play. Imagine the horror – if you don’t have such capability! The deceptive practice of generating invalid clicks on ads with malicious intent and you were making payout for these invalid clicks and impressions. Fig. 01: Checks via Click Integrity Click fraud poses a significant threat to advertisers worldwide from India to Southeast Asia (SEA) and the United States, no corner of the digital landscape is immune to this menace. Advertisers need to fortify their defenses and prevent the wastage of advertising budget. An active ad fraud detection that monitors clicks and impression integrity enables you to mitigate fraudulent clicks, safeguarding your brand’s reputation and preserving your ad budget. Building Trust Through Transparency to Prevent Click Fraud Trust is the currency that fuels success. Advertisers seek transparency and accountability from their partners. The goal is clear – They need optimal results from their advertising efforts and enhanced ROI on ad spend. Consider a scenario –  you’re a brand operating in the competitive landscape of the United States, where click fraud and spamming tactics run rampant. Your ad campaign is gaining traction, but you suspect foul play behind the scenes as invalid clicks are ruining your ad campaign performance metrics. Monitoring your click integrity empowers advertisers to thrive in such scenarios. Brands need a multi-level, defense mechanism across the funnel to meticulously track and validate ad impressions and clicks. Case Study: Major EdTech Player in India Analysis period in February 2023 started running a performance campaign to acquire new customers monitored by mFilterIt ad traffic validation solution. They were able to identify fake clicks and safeguarded their budget from heavy payouts. Fig. 02: Fraud detection and analysis with click & impression integrity for an EdTech player. The brand saved a massive amount of ad spend over 3 Months. For this EdTech company, the major issue was Fake Attribution (52.45%), The affiliates attributed installs by generating fake clicks after the user installed the app. The install was organic but due to the fake click, the install was attributed to the affiliate so that the affiliate could gain monetary benefits from the brand. Cases like these illustrate that the problem is beyond click spamming. Fake or invalid clicks are one part of the fraudulent activities that adversely impact the efficiency of ad campaigns. To fortify their ad campaign performance, they must optimize every aspect across the funnel with multi-level defense. Fig. 03: Impact of Click Fraud The Way Forward Monitor Your Click Integrity for a Brighter Future! Maintaining click integrity is non-negotiable. It’s the cornerstone of trust and transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem. What’s the moral of the story? So, dear advertisers, safeguard your brand’s reputation, optimize campaign performance and combat click fraud to reduce spamming. Start a new era of trust and build transparency in the digital ecosystem. Don’t waste your precious resources. Instead, focus your efforts on maximizing the impact while ensuring click integrity to steer your ad campaign strategically. Get in Touch to learn more about Click Fraud detection and prevention.  

The entire world is connected online, around 64 percent to be exact. With this, a door of opportunity has opened for businesses across the world. However, with this opportunity comes a responsibility. The businesses are accountable for protecting the consumer’s data safe and providing a seamless experience. However, it is not easy.   With the evolution of the digital landscape, there has been a rapid rise in fraudulent activities. One of them is synthetic identity fraud which costs businesses close to $5 billion in 2024.   Imagine spending months to plan that ideal campaign to attract the desired audience as new customers. And you get new customers as well. However, later you discover that the actual number of real users was much less than the number projected.   Reason?   A major chunk of these new users was fraudulent.   The real concern is that this scenario is not hypothetical anymore. Synthetic identity fraud is a real problem existing in the digital landscape.   What is Synthetic Identity Fraud? Synthetic identity fraud is a type of deception technique where criminals leverage a combination of fake and real data to create a new identity to defraud one or more businesses. These methods bypass KYC verification checks, abuse brand promotions, and offers, take out line credit, purchase with stolen credit cards, launder money, and many more ways.   The synthetic identity is crafted with such precision that it seems credible, which helps to pass security checks when opening an account or making a purchase. As quoted by Security Magazine, 46% of organizations faced synthetic identity fraud in 2022. It is among one of the fastest-growing forms of identity theft.   What has resulted in the rise of Synthetic Identity Fraud? The personally identifiable information (PII) like emails and mobile numbers are available on the dark web. This helps fraudsters to create fake identities that are hard to differentiate from real identities.  The biggest black box in identifying synthetic identity fraud is that fraudsters don’t use it just after creating a synthetic identity. Instead, they create the identities and use these for a year or more like a genuine person before committing fraud.       For example, Fraudsters open an account using the synthetic identity for an existing credit card. This helps them to create a credit file and they do all the activities to appear as a genuine ID. Once the trap is set, they leverage it to claim a larger credit line.   Where Synthetic Identities Are Used by Fraudsters? 1. Financial Institutions: The most common way for fraudsters to use synthetic identity is in the banking and lending industries. Before executing the synthetic identities for fraudulent practices, the fraudsters set the trap by creating a good credit history with the financial institutions. The organizations believe that the synthetic identity is genuine, eventually leading to the onboarding and creation of an account created by a fake person.   According to a report by Regula, 26% of banks reported over 100 incidents of identity fraud in 2022. 31% of the banks stated that these incidents have cost them an average of $479,000 and more.   2. Online Marketplaces: There is a loophole in online and eCommerce marketplaces which the fraudsters have identified. To provide a seamless customer experience, they keep fewer checks in place especially when it comes to creating new accounts and making the first purchase.   Fraudsters use synthetic identities to create fake accounts and make high-value purchases to get a chargeback. This results in an increase in the burden of losses for merchants.    Signs to detect and prevent Synthetic Identity Theft? Some of the hallmark signs that indicate Synthetic identity fraud are:   A single social security number is used repeatedly  Multiple accounts created using a single IP address   The same personal information used to create multiple accounts   How do we fight against synthetic identity fraud?   Identity fraud or Synthetic identities are hard to detect due to their sophisticated movements and processes. Therefore, banking institutions and other organizations need to invest in an in-house expert or an external tech partner with the capability of detecting ever-evolving identity scams. To stay ahead of the ever-evolving threats of digital identity organizations need to rely on a solution that can identify beyond the basic attributes of a synthetic identity while maintaining a seamless experience for customers.  mFilterIt’s comprehensive Identity Scan solution possesses the capabilities to maximize the detection and prevention of the ever-evolving synthetic identity fraud. Leveraging the power of open-source intelligence our solution helps financial institutions and other organizations deal with identity theft.   Our extensive data harvesters and database repository enable brands to utilize digital user data for identity verifications using social risk parameters.   Protect your business from potential identity scams with us!   Get in touch with our experts for deeper insights. Reach out to learn more!

Digital advertising, being a relatively new channel, is still evolving. As digital ads become more and more popular, new concerns are being identified. One such concern that has been in the limelight recently is data transparency. Users are becoming increasingly concerned about their privacy. They want to (rightfully) control who obtains their information, how they obtain it, and how they use said information. In other words, digital users expect brands to build trust through transparency. However, such concerns are not limited to users. Transparency matters also concern advertisers. As third-party cookies are being phased out and the focus on privacy becomes sharper, brands must also demand transparency from advertising platforms and providers. Recent privacy regulations and concerns surrounding consumer trust have made things more difficult for brands. In such times, access to reliable data and transparency have become critical to success. Still wondering why? Here are three solid reasons: Reasons Brands Need Data Transparency to Thrive in 2024 1. Mitigate The Risks Bad data negatively impacts digital efficiency. This means that bad data prevents brands from making the most of their advertising and marketing efforts. This is because bad data usually stems from invalid traffic or anomalies found in ad traffic reporting. Such instances can impact the marketing of brands in a variety of ways. The most obvious impact is the wasted ad spend. If you are paying for a click or an impression, and if it doesn’t come from a real user, then your ad budget for said click or impression is wasted. Fraudsters may use bots or click farms to direct invalid traffic to an advertiser’s website and steal their advertising dollars. A less obvious impact of invalid traffic is on organic rankings and traffic of websites. Too much invalid traffic may lead to a website losing precious rankings and traffic on search engines. On the contrary, if brands have access to reliable data, they can effectively mitigate these risks. Access to accurate data will enable brands to accurately pinpoint their most valuable traffic sources and nurture them. It will also give them clarity on their effective channels and best-performing campaigns in which they can invest for greater returns. 2. Targeted Reach One area of digital advertising where there is a serious lack of transparency is ad placements. Advertising networks and platforms let brands exercise some control over who sees their ads. By targeting the right audience, brands can ensure that their ads are being displayed on websites frequented by their target audience. However, this is usually only true in theory. In most cases, brands have little control over or information about the websites that publish their advertisements. As a result, many brands remain unaware that their ads are being displayed next to irrelevant content or on completely irrelevant websites. The obvious impact of this is, once again, wasted ad spend. If the ads are being served to users who may not find them relevant, the conversion rates suffer, diminishing the returns for the brand. The less obvious impact of the same can be observed in extreme cases. In such cases, brands become victims of unsafe ad placements. This means that without the knowledge of the brand/advertisers, their ads are displayed next to questionable or extremist content. It isn’t difficult to imagine the impact on a brand if its ad is displayed next to, say, homophobic content. While the brands have little control over this, most users who view these ads are unaware of the same. As a result, when such unfortunate ad placements come to light, the advertising brand’s image suffers the most damage. If, however, brands have the power to verify and control where their ads are displayed, they get access to targeted reach. This means that brands can target users who are most likely to respond to their offer and convert into paying customers. 3. Improve Efficiency One of the biggest yet most overlooked effects of bad data on advertising is skewed metrics. The most lucrative aspect of digital advertising is the access to ad reporting data that enables optimization decisions. However, due to the lack of transparency, bad actors in the advertising supply chain may tamper with their traffic reports in the hopes of making a quick buck. Similarly, invalid traffic can make campaign reports inaccurate. It may compel advertisers to give credit to bot traffic sources and overlook legitimate ones. Alarmingly, this effect isn’t limited to traffic sources. Bad data may lead advertisers to invest in the wrong ad variations, audience variations, and even ad platforms. In the long run, this can have a compounding effect on wasted ad spending. On the flip side, if brands can validate their traffic, execute data optimization, and get access to accurate reporting, optimization decisions will be easier and more accurate. This can result in substantial improvements in the ROI a brand can expect from its digital advertising efforts. Your Partner for Trust and Transparency The good news is that brands and advertisers are not powerless about transparency. By validating traffic and publishers and carefully selecting advertising platforms and vendors, advertisers can ensure access to transparent and reliable data. Manually validating traffic and its sources can prove to be inefficient. It is time-consuming, and there exists a margin for human error. This is where a solution like mFilterIt becomes relevant. Using AI and ML algorithms, mFilterIt’s ad fraud solution and brand safety tools validate traffic and publishers in real-time along with tracking the unsafe ad placements. Our solution ensures continuous monitoring of traffic and traffic sources, eliminating all margins of error or overlooked incidents. It also enables brands to stay clear of objectionable ad placements and reduces the risk of brand risks. It is designed to enable informed business decisions based on reliable, verified data. Way forward A transparent internet is better for users and brands alike. As we progress toward a more privacy-focused future for the web, advertisers’ reliance on transparent data will only become more prominent. It will enable advertisers to continue being productive contributors to a better internet and

Every brand in the digital ecosystem is in the rat race to expand its presence, build brand reputation, and gain customer trust. But to excel in this race brands need to make sure they safeguard their efforts from threats like Brand infringement. The major brand challenge is identifying infringement cases and building an automated takedown, reporting, or blacklisting mechanism to protect their brand reputation and maintain brand integrity. Fake Apps, Websites, Social Media Handles, Customer Care, Job Posts, or any fake Brand Communications must be identified to protect brand image along with the detection of counterfeit products and sellers. Let’s dig deeper to unveil what it takes to detect brand infringement cases and mitigate the risk and adverse impact of brand infringement. Why do brands need Brand Safety monitoring and Infringement Protection? Brands in the digital ecosystem need to protect brand reputation by safeguarding their assets from high-risk digital content for both apps and the web. This includes Unsafe & Non-Contextual Media Placement Relevancy of Media Campaigns Web Brand Safety Keyword Bidding Fraud Coupon & Incent fraud Another key aspect for brands in e-commerce business on online marketplaces is needed to safeguard from brand abuse by identifying and eliminating digital infringements and counterfeits. This includes Identifying and blacklisting fake sites and social media handles Listing of Fake Customer Care Contact numbers Malicious and fraudulent Brand Communication Monitoring APK Copycat Apps Protection from Account Overs – credential sharing With solutions utilizing the open-source intelligence brands can protect their reputation, build customer trust, and prevent revenue losses. The risk assessment across the brand’s digital activity helps protect the brand from brand infringement threats. Case Study – How a leading construction and real-estate brand identified and prevented brand infringement cases. The brand prevented Intellectual Property Infringement – Any violation or breach of protected intellectual property rights in logo/design infringement and domain infringement or Cybersquatting. With mFilterIt, they conducted scans for similar URLs, Pages, and Websites about similar keywords, content, or visuals in the global web horizon. The solution flagged off any fraudulent activity to the advertiser to take corrective action. Brand acted on the shared data with corrective action. Fake Websites impersonating the construction company and using the brand names of Prestige Constructions in the domain name were identified. Fake social media handles impersonating Construction firms are identified on Instagram and Facebook. Unauthorized Facebook Ads using construction firm Logo/IP detected For Another multinational food manufacturing company job promotions propagated on social media platforms to mislead or defraud job seekers were detected. How to mitigate the risk of brand infringement The brand must monitor the use of its intellectual property in the digital ecosystem. A comprehensive detection and prevention mechanism in place can enable brands to protect themselves from infringement across apps, web, social media, e-commerce, and other media platforms. Brands must implement robust monitoring systems that monitor unauthorized use of brand assets, or any counterfeit product sold online. Proactive measures to protect intellectual property rights with prompt takedown action. A mechanism to detect and measure the risk associated with brand infringement Identify any guidelines or pricing violations by authorized sellers/distributors or retailers. Enable best practices to combat brand infringements effectively. Be adaptive and vigilant against the sophisticated and evolving threats to brand integrity in the digital ecosystem. Stay informed on emerging trends and technologies for brand protection Final Thought To safeguard your brand from infringement, you must be aware of the far-reaching impact it can have on your brand reputation and revenue. Loss of Revenue, brand reputation damage, customer trust erosion, regulatory compliance risks, and long-term business impact can be prevented with a proactive approach and brand infringement protection solutions. Get in touch to learn more about brand infringement and brand infringement solution

Horses for courses – What sells more on Blinkit, might not get the same response on Zepto. On the same pin code, three different dark stores may have different product availability and more orders of particular brands as compared to others. Pricing and bundling of products also vary from one quick commerce platform as compared to others. Therefore, building a strategy for e-commerce and quick commerce marketplaces demands insights and analysis covering different platforms, geographies, dark stores, and trends versus competition. Let’s explore what it takes to build a strategy for e-commerce marketplaces and what brands need to stay competitive in a fast-paced evolving digital commerce ecosystem. Matching the pace of evolving needs of E-commerce marketplaces Gone are the days when e-commerce marketplaces were limited to metros. The e-commerce horizons are expanding to tier-2, tier-3 cities, and beyond. Ease of payment and swift internet has led to a new revolution. This scenario is not limited to a single country, but global e-commerce is picking up pace with Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia (AMESA) region leading the charge. The global eCommerce online sales reached $5.8 Trillion in 2023 and are expected to grow to $6.3 trillion globally in 2024 The astronomical rise in e-commerce sales and competitive landscape spicing up has opened multiple sales avenues from e-commerce brands in the digital commerce landscape which include E-commerce, Q-com marketplaces, D2C platforms, and social commerce with massive role of influencers driving sales. Building strategy with marketplace intelligence and insights can help scale business, identify market gaps, target new unexplored geographies, and target demographics. Data Driven Intelligence for e-com growth E-commerce growth requires strategies that can leverage data and insights to boost brand presence at pin-code levels across multiple marketplaces. Monitoring brand performance versus competition in the digital space is the key to staying ahead and staying competitive. Big brands with massive SKUs venturing into multiple categories, sub-categories, and product variants need comprehensive insights along with monitoring their sellers versus competition. Optimizing delivery turn-around time and identifying pricing violations are the key challenges. For Quick commerce, availability becomes a key factor. To identify gaps in strategies, tracking market trends along with varying requirements of different platforms requires high-quality digital shelf monitoring. Comparatively smaller brands looking to go head-on with established well-known global brands require insights into what set them apart and identify the market gaps and opportunities at the micro-level. ecommerce competitive analysis and actionable insights can help them identify their audience and white spaces in the market. This could enable say, a local indigenous toothpaste brand in Southeast Asia to compete with brands like Pepsodent or Colgate. May be not at all sub-categories but on say, 100gm pack at some region on Lazada or Shopee. Every brand has different needs that require a solution that can be customized to suit their needs on different e-commerce platforms. Protecting Your Brand Integrity on E-commerce Marketplaces The e-commerce strategies for brands on digital marketplaces should not be limited to just digital commerce intelligence. Both on and off-platform activities must be in sync to boost brand reputation on the platform. Therefore, here are some things brands need to elevate performance on e-commerce platforms. E-commerce perfect page analysis: On every platform and geography brands’ products may have different competition. To make this battle more interesting all platforms require a different strategy. Therefore, platform-level analysis or perfect page analysis across platforms is required to ensure consistency and brand presence across the digital commerce landscape. Analytics for its Sellers: Sellers on e-commerce platforms also need to upswing their process with Digital Shelf monitoring, Marketing Automation, and Automated Cataloguing. This can help simplify the process, and boost sales with more buy box wins. Platform-Level Intelligence: The rise of digital commerce has revolutionized the customer behavior. Options are plenty for shoppers to pick the shopping platforms and products, this makes the online shopping ecosystem more competitive. Monitoring, identifying white spaces and real-time actionable insights are strategic intelligence required to optimize performance across platforms. Final Thought Intelligence drives performance on e-commerce platforms. E-commerce strategy must cover platform-level intelligence, seller analysis, and competitive insights on KPIs like pricing, availability, keyword share, product page content, delivery turnaround time, and more. Every brand faces its own set of challenges on different e-commerce platforms and geographies, identifying the gaps, exploring new opportunities, and enabling a brand to optimize performance across categories, sub-categories, and product variants requires a data-driven strategy. Get in touch to learn more about leveraging digital commerce intelligence to build e-commerce strategies.