How to beat the bots in 3 steps
It’s less than two months until Asia Pacific’s biggest shopping season kicks off, but consumers aren’t the only ones counting down. As the holy trinity of shopping festivals – Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday – cause online traffic to surge dramatically, cybercriminals prepare for their own windfall in the form of ad fraud. As with any seasonal holiday, retailers and e-commerce sites will naturally step up their digital advertising efforts, a goldmine for scammers intent on sabotaging these campaigns for financial gain.
For unwitting retailers pouring millions of dollars into digital advertising, ad fraud is a bigger problem — and more costly than most realize. Today, digital ad fraud in APAC is estimated at $17 million a day, a number that will only increase during the peak of the shopping spree in November. There are three key ways to prevent and minimize the impact of ad fraud. First, however, retailers and digital marketers need to understand the causes and effects of ad fraud. who the criminals are and what their tactics are.
Widespread misattribution
Ad fraud primarily occurs when criminals use bots and click farms to exploit advertising platforms and brands by impersonating real human traffic in digital campaigns. These false clicks increase ad traffic and impressions, skewing a marketer’s campaign data and wasting their budget. Frustratingly for marketers, ad scammers are becoming more sophisticated at mimicking human behavior, making bot activity difficult to detect and contain.
Ad fraud extends beyond bots to click spam and click injection, where scammers perform clicks on users who didn’t click them and steal organic users. Ad fraud is rampant for ecommerce merchants as bots create multiple fake accounts to take advantage of signup offers. Taken together, these tactics hamper a brand’s search engine optimization performance; Generate false leads and pollute sales pipelines and key marketing metrics. They also lead to widespread misattribution of ecommerce app installs and in-app events like logins and purchases.
For marketers, this is a hard-earned budget that’s going down the drain. This year, APAC is expected to spend $60 billion on mobile app install campaigns, about a third of which will be spent on e-commerce. However, according to our figures, 40 percent of these installations are invalid. That means $720 million is wasted on activities that don’t add value to advertisers. This gargantuan number comes before factoring in the increased return on ad spend from the budget that goes to real users. Before the holidays, retail marketers and agencies invest time, creativity and energy into exciting and engaging campaigns to attract their target audience. To see effort and money being wasted is highly demoralizing for everyone involved.
However, combating the threat of ad fraud also takes time and effort of your own, and preparation is key. The first step is to keep a close eye on the numbers. Before 11/11, the first of the big shopping festivals, marketers and their agencies need to set clear metrics and monitor them closely. If anomalies occur during a traffic peak, e.g. B. short user session times, high bounce rates and abnormally high click-through rates, there is a potential opportunity for fraudulent traffic.
The next tactic is to refine ad targeting and set narrower audience frames for each campaign. The more accurately marketers target their audience, the easier and faster it is to spot unusual activity. Targeting quality websites is also crucial. Poor quality websites are more likely to attract ad scammers. Marketers and their agencies can mitigate this by targeting a select group of specific, high-quality sites, rather than mass targeting sites with the relevant keywords. Marketers can also blacklist domains and IP addresses.
The final step is to examine the traffic sources. For example, if a campaign was targeting buyers from Singapore and a high level of traffic was coming from elsewhere, advertiser scammers could be coming from that geographic location. Retail marketers and their agencies also need to be vigilant during high traffic spikes during the shopping season. When conversions or other important metrics aren’t showing up amidst traffic, fraudulent activity can occur.
The November season is now arguably the highlight of APAC’s retail calendar alongside the Lunar New Year. But for retail brands facing ongoing bot attacks, the season of hilarity can quickly become a stressful one. However, retail marketers who prepare and act quickly will be counting their investment returns, not their losses, once the shopping season ends.
Chadwick Kinley is Chief Marketing Officer at TrafficGuard.
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