Monday, July 28, 2014

The dark side of Digital Marketing: Bots used in Ad Fraud

We touched base in class about the fraud in digital marketing. I went on to research on how big is this problem and what is the modus operandi of these bad guys.

I came across a presentation by Dr. Augistine Fou which discusses this issue in detail. Here is the summary of Dr. Fou's presentation on the execution strategy of using bots for ad fraud

1. Make Fake Websites: Bots create fake website and plagiarize content and fill the site with ads

2. Generate Fake Traffic: Bots auto load and re-load these fake website pages with display ads, generating impressions. These impressiona are sold to ad exchanges (on a CPM basis).

3. Generate Ad Views and Clicks: Bots keep on auto reloading the pages to generate ad impressions and generate fake clicks to earn PPC revenue

The most striking data in the presentation was related to the market size of this fraudulent market. According to Dr. Fou, 39% of total US digital ad spend gets scooped up by these bad guys, with Video and Display advertising performing the worst with an average of 60% and 50% of total spent on advertising going toward fraud respectively. Now that's insane!

No comments: