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Apr 12, 2022 3:41:00 PM

An Introduction To Ad Viewability

We've heard about the death of the click for years, but the click has been pervasive, surviving each wave of innovation. But it appears that the click has met its match, as a new metric has taken hold across the online advertising industry; a metric with the power to become equally or potentially more important than the click: Ad Viewability.

That metric is ad viewability; an online advertising metric that tracks only the impressions that users actually see. For example, if an advertisement loads at the bottom of a website but a user doesn’t scroll down far enough to see it, that impression would not be deemed viewable. Viewability is designed to let advertisers pay only for the advertisements that users actually see.

To understand the implications of viewability, let’s take a step back and look at the previous landscape of buying, selling, and serving display ads.

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Jul 19, 2021 8:32:00 PM

What the Heck Is Ad Viewability?

Do you knowexactlyhow many people are viewing your online ads? No? Well, its sad to say that it’s probably a lot fewer people than you think. In fact, a study by Google found that more than half (56.1%) of online display ad impressions are not seen by consumers. This means that you may have effectively been throwing your digital ad money away.

Impressions versus viewability

Advertisers have traditionally used impressions as a metric to measure ad performance. Yet many of these impressions result from page visits in which the visitor never actually sees the ads, either because they’re displayed too low, or worse — the impression is down to a bot.

The way around this is to embrace ad viewability - which looks at whether an ad is actually in view to readers on publishers’ websites.Advertisers that embrace ad viewability over impressions will learn which placements are worth the investment.

Above-the-fold (ATF) impressions, for example, do not promise ad viewability. In fact, less than half of ATF impressions are actually viewable, due to the fact that: Many visitors start scrolling down as soon as they visit a page and see top ads for less than a second, and ad vendors self-categorize what constitutes “above” and “below” the fold, which can persuade clients into over-paying for a less-than-suitable placement.

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Oct 15, 2015 9:00:00 AM

How to Minimize Click Fraud in 9 Minutes

Today, most companies are aware of just how useful PPC advertising can be to their overall online marketing scheme. However, the effectiveness of your PPC campaign can quickly be diminished when up to 20% of your budget is frequently wasted due to fraudulent activity. The right PPC activity can improve search visibility, drive extra traffic towards your website, and enhance customer conversion levels. In fact, research suggests that most businesses and websites online today will engage in a PPC marketing program at some point.

However, the trouble is that PPC is not immune to the malicious marketers out there that choose to manipulate the model and abuse click-through rates as a way of sabotaging their competitors. Click Fraud is a serious issue for any business that encounters it, and if left unnoticed for too long, it's an issue that can drain significant funds out of your marketing budget, while placating you with the impression that your schemes are actually successful.

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Sep 3, 2015 8:51:00 AM

How To Protect Your Online Advertising Campaign From Click Fraud

We have spent a lot of time writing and discussing the issue of fraud within the online advertising industry, specifically click fraud. If part of your advertising strategy is made up of PPC (pay-per-click) ads, then the primary concern you'll need to think about is click fraud - and the effect it could be having on your business success. Becoming a victim of click fraud means that your advertising budget quickly disappears, while potential customers are actually prevented from reaching your website.

For many small businesses, pay per click advertising is an attractive and useful marketing option. The reason for this is that it's often a fast and effective way for websites to generate traffic, boost their website ranking, and increase overall conversions. On top of that, pay per click ensures that you only have to pay for the clicks that you actually get. Although PPC can be a smart solution for website promotion, if you want your campaign to be successful, you'll need to be cautious when it comes to monitoring your PPC activity - or you could risk becoming yet another victim of click fraud.

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Jul 16, 2015 9:32:00 AM

How to Identify Click Fraud and Minimize Wasting Your Ad Budget

How would you feel if up to 20% of your price-per-click (PPC) budget was being regularly wasted as a result of fraudulent activity? Most marketers today know that Pay-per-click advertising is a useful, and effective marketing tool that can drive traffic towards your website, improving search visibility and enhancing customer conversion. In fact, almost all websites and businesses online today that engaged in serious online marketing schemes will take advantage of PPC programs like Google AdWords at some point.

Unfortunately, although a targeted PPC campaign can be an ideal way of boosting your online traffic, it is not immune to the unscrupulous marketers out there that abuse the PPC model to sabotage competitors. Click-fraud is a serious issue to anyone unlucky enough to encounter it, and unnoticed click fraud can drain money from your marketing budget, while providing the false impression that your schemes are successful - thereby creating an even bigger problem.

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Jun 9, 2015 9:00:00 AM

ExactDrive Partners With MdotLabs To Help Detech Non-Human Traffic

comScore knew they were buying a great brand when they agreed a deal to acquire MdotLabs last summer. Technology and the Internet have combined to create a vast digital world that’s growing every day – and MdotLabs used innovative techniques to focuson something very important: helpingfight online fraud.

More specifically, we’re talking about protecting advertising companies from potentially malicious web traffic and ExactDrive is excited to be in partnership with mDotLabs (comScore).

Fraudulent attacks on the digital advertising industry are a big issue and, as such,protecting an advertising campaign has never been more necessary. Non-human traffic, click-farms and other shady bot-related activities gobble up roughly $14 billion in advertising spend. That figure is thought to amount to between 25% and 50% of ad spend per campaign.

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Jun 8, 2015 10:24:11 AM

Is Online Advertising Fraud Still A Massive Problem?

Before 2011, it was thought that the problem of online advertising fraud was more or less contained. Pay-per-click advertising was still experiencing huge growth, but much of the fraud activity and many of the practices had been seen and countered.

Google themselves have long since acknowledged the need to clamp down on fraud. Google is a business like any other; people need to trust them. For instance, they knew that if they failed to detect click-through fraud, then advertisers would lose faith in their brand. There’s nothing quite like a potential drop in profits to kick-start a company into taking action.

Bots, click farms and the like were treated as a priority for the company. And for good reason. Google used experts like Professor Alexander Tuzhilin to draw up best practices for preventing click fraud and things seemed to be working.

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Mar 12, 2015 8:00:00 AM

The Biggest Problems With Online Advertising And How You Can Fix Them

Digital marketing plays an ever more central role in most business's marketing plans. From retargeting, to social; there are plenty of creative and cost effective ways to get your brand under the noses of hundreds, if not thousands of potential customers.

However, despite the many benefits of touting your brand on the internet, online advertising continues to be plagued by fraud and viewability issues, as well as low creative standards, leading critics to question its effectiveness, and future.

Is online advertising broken?

Some say that display advertising has some fundamental problems that may never get fixed. They argue that it suffers from low click-through rates (0.1% on display ads), widespread click fraud and low viewability – (only half of the ads served online are actually seen by users). Concerns have also been voiced about the "creepy" nature of retargeting, irritating pop-ups and the prevalent use of ad-blocking software.

So is it broken?

We don’t think so. It’s just suffering from an image problem, and progress is already being made to fix the issues. For example, the Media Rating Council (MRC) and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently released their ‘Viewable Impression Measurement Guidelines’, which set out parameters to measure viewable impressions. They state that 50% of pixels must be in the viewable portion of an internet browser for a minimum of one second, (two seconds for video ads), to qualify as a ‘viewable’ display impression.

By adopting this standard, marketers and publishers will benefit from the improved quality and accountability of their digital advertising efforts.

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Mar 4, 2015 8:00:00 AM

Click Fraud: Expectations Vs. Reality

American businesses will spend over $43 billion on online banner and display ads this year, and yet nearly half of all the ad clicks will be fraudulent or fake. They will be performed by bots, which areautomated computer programs that browse the web masquerading as humans, for the purpose of committing click fraud.

Click fraud is one of the biggest challenges facing the digital advertising industry today. Millions of online advertising dollars go to waste due to bots, click fraud, and out-of-sight placements. And click fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Bots can imitate the behavior of consumers, by watching a video or making an online purchase. Videos cost more to create, so CPMs are higher, making them a prime target for fraudsters. According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), bots account for 23% of video ad views.

As an industry, digital advertisers are worried about click fraud - and they are right to be, but sometimes people assume something is click fraud when it’s not.

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Feb 11, 2015 8:00:00 AM

Watch Out: How Click Fraud Is Taking Over And What To Do About It Part 2

Click fraud has been around since the beginning of internet advertising and fraudster’s methods have become more advanced over the years, leading to sophisticated BattlestarGalactica-like internet bots that mimic human behavior with false clicks.

Whether you know it or not, your brand is shelling out money for clicks that did not come from humans, and the problem is endemic. In 2014, click fraud cost advertisers $11 billion and unfortunately, it is easier to get away with than cross checking in hockey, or late hits in football.

What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is a method used by competitors who are frustrated with seeing a certain company’s ads appear above their own. By employing people (or bots) to commit click fraud on their behalf, their aim is to spend your daily budget before the day has even begun.

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