With the aim of creating a more transparent mobile ecosystem where marketers pay only for the ads that are verified and drive real value, Aarki is investing in fraud detection and protection initiatives such as joining Adjust’s Coalition Against Ad Fraud (CAAF). Aarki’s VP of Product, Nicol Cseko, spoke to Adjust about ad fraud and our membership in CAAF.
See the original article on Adjust’s blog.
Beyond lost campaign spend, how have you seen mobile ad fraud impact the industry?
There is a perception issue as well as a fraud issue. As a DSP, we want to work with marketers to help them reach new audiences or audiences in a more effective manner. Fear of fraud can suppress experimentation with inventory and partners which further inhibits competition.
Is there a single big takeaway that you think advertisers should be aware of when it comes to ad fraud?
It’s hard to have a single benchmark for fraud. Depending on campaigns and what/who you are targeting you may see different install or post-install behaviors and trends. It’s important to dig into suspected cases beyond initial metrics that have flagged them to see in what other ways those users interact with the app or brand’s products/services. Benchmarks are a great way to identify areas of potentially suspicious campaign activity but it’s important to look beyond just top-line stats.
What does Aarki do to proactively fight fraud in its systems?
Aarki works to fight fraud in a few different ways.
Our partnerships in the ecosystem are one key factor for fighting fraud. We work with attribution partners (such as Adjust) and proactively track our campaigns against their fraud and suspicious activity metrics. We believe it’s important to work with our advertisers and their attribution partners throughout the campaign and actively raise and evaluate supply concerns as they happen.
We vet our supply sources carefully, focusing on pure RTB enabled traffic, and actively removing undesirable supply via our exchange partners and in our bidders.
We also leverage our machine learning and data science team heavily. Our bidding is influenced by predictive user models that forecast the probability of post-install and purchase events for advertisers to optimize towards generating high ROI. This model allows us to value user impressions that correlate to active post-install behaviors but we also actively analyze our campaigns’ performance to identify anomalies to investigate so that we can further refine our models.
The key takeaway is that there is not a single step that is enough to fight fraud and we are most effective when we take a multi-pronged approach both within Aarki and with our customers and partners.
What does Aarki do to educate its customers on the subject of fraud?
We are very transparent in our supply sources and bidding strategy and the work we do internally to monitor campaigns. We find that it is most effective to educate in tandem with our partners. In day-to-day campaign management, we also leverage our partners in attribution to monitor our campaign health and have a dialogue with our customers and supply sources if any questions arise.
What motivated Aarki to join the Coalition Against Ad Fraud?
Aarki shares the same goal as Adjust’s CAAF - to combat ad fraud in our industry.
We found that fighting fraud is best done from several angles, including working with our ecosystem partners. Given this, it was a logical next step for us to join CAAF.
In our experience, we have been best able to investigate and take appropriate steps on ad fraud only when working together in partnership with our customers, supply sources, and attribution partners. There is not always a single, easy way to identify fraud, and what may look suspicious to one party may not be when we overlay key information from all potential parties. But, it takes a lot of trust and open communication to jointly tackle such efforts. Our hope for the CAAF is that it encourages this type of behavior, where the advertisers are open to working proactively with their partners, and each other, to investigate and learn to fight fraud together.
What's been the best thing about joining CAAF?
CAAF enables open communication across mobile programmatic industry leaders, allowing us to have a healthy discourse for a unified goal of developing solutions that will benefit all players.
Want to join Aarki and others in the fight against fraud? Click here to discover what it takes to become a member of CAAF.
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