Ad Fraud is Surprisingly Obvious to Spot

Digital media has been around for multiple decades at this point, but has still failed to clean up its ad fraud mess. What’s worse, it’s getting worse at it. Incredibly each year the amount of money spent on ad fraud protection increases while at the same time the amount of ad fraud occurring is also increasing. Who’s scamming who?

As an absolute bare minimum advertisers should be able to know what they’re buying. However, if you buy ads through Google’s ad network it is impossible to know what sites or apps you’re buying ads on. After you run a campaign Google will usually provide reporting that says where your ads ran but running a lucky dip and calling it an ad exchange shouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar business.

The closest thing to a governing body for digital ads, the IAB, defines a standard called seller.json. While it doesn’t require all sites and apps ads can be shown on to be listed, it does require all publishers to be listed, which is almost as good. One catch is that publishers can be listed as anonymous.

In general publishers shouldn’t be anonymous (because it defeats the purpose of the whole initiative), but the option exists for short term use when publicly showing publisher names would leak confidential business agreements.

This where we see that Google’s attempt at transparency is truly laughable. Large exchanges like AppNexus and Pubmatic disclose the identity of over 99% of their publisher’s they work with. Google discloses less than 30% (warning link is slow to load).

It begs the question, why aren’t Google comfortable sharing this information? I’m kicking off a project to develop tools that will help marketers catch fraud early, and so far the surprising thing is how easy is it is to identify.