I know the answer to the ad fraud question!

Industry must push verification deeper – and work harder with agencies, clients and networks to ensure bot exclusion on DSPs and exchanges, writes Marco Ricci, CEO of Adloox.

I know what you’re thinking. This could be another article about how rife online traffic fraud is in the RTB industry. You’re expecting a series of worryingly high (but varied) percentages, theories of just how bad the problem is, and that something has to be done, right now. Right and wrong.

In reality, the days of the fraud rumour-mill are long behind us. No more need for scaremongering. And 2014, the year when media companies and industry bodies gathered together to try and find a holistic solution, has also passed. 2015 has to be the year we wake up.

Some verification companies are saying they’re trying, but fraudsters are always one step ahead. Others are claiming there are now more intelligent, articulate ways fraud can cheat the RTB system, fraud sites able to morph low quality impressions into large scale, premium inventory by a series of code exchanges, thus deceiving everyone in the process.

We even have different names for the bots now. Almost like a Marvel Comic ensemble: Deceptibots, Vader Bots and Voldermorts are all, some might argue, winning right now against the good guys. So is there a magic wand we can wave to combat this evil?

My last article, entitled ‘The Imitation game‘, touched upon the start of fraud-free collaborations between verification companies and DSPs. In the last month, we have also seen verification vendors introducing global seller trust reports, seemingly deciding for all us media mortals which 20 sellers you can trust out of over 400 active sellers and networks available today.

But none of these companies will ever publish their ‘secret sauce’ that scores and evaluates the 100s of billions of impressions they claim to verify every day.

Different tools grade viewability, ad blocking rates and fraud differently. And seller indices and their ranking position, I assume if managed and optimised accurately, would automatically change from one day to the next, and therefore surely a report released just once a month, is already 29 days too late?

There is confusion. Especially around what constitutes the right measurement of programmatic success. Is it click-through-rate (CTR), conversion rates, viewability, engagement?

Pre-bid blocking of blacklists is drying up the watering holes of bad traffic, but networks seem reluctant to exclude sellers that are running 90% on fraudulent inventory, as they feel there is still 10% of goodness in there, and the chance to eek out some decent viewability and click-through activity.

I don’t believe this theory.

Many of the clicks are fake and a large proportion of views and engagements are from bots, not humans. Surely a 10% success rate is symptomatic of a company that is averse to flying straight, and seems likely to repeat their malpractice in the future, albeit brokering out to new fraudulent websites.

There is clearly a need for a period of re-education on sell-side, and buy-side commitment to optimising via fine-tuning of these pre-bid strategies, including the option in DSPs to create pre-bid segments at placement/lower levels than just seller or tag.

I believe the answer is at campaign-level. By analysing their tailor-made, bespoke strategies and then auditing the performance of the sellers’ website domains on each and every campaign, we can spot repeat offenders, cleanse the inventory list of inefficiencies, and create custom pre-bid segments based on individual campaign inventory and deliverables.

If verification companies transparently communicated and reacted to their analysis at this level less fraudsters would slip through the net. Too many are avoiding capture through negligence and lack of attention to detail.

We are all trying to summarise at macro level, when the real issues need to be tackled at micro level. The whole is only as good as the sum of its parts. So until we push verification deeper, and work harder with agencies, clients and networks to push for exclusion on DSPs and exchanges, I can’t trust ‘global trust reports’.

There is evidence that this method can work. Programmatic specialists Infectious Media have been early adopters of this strategy, resulting in an ad blocking rate of under 1%, and a dramatic decrease in fraud activity across both their Appnexus and Internal Bidder platforms.

“We now feel much more at ease running on the long tail of inventory available in ad exchanges, without jeopardising brand safety or the quality of inventory” says Andy Cocker, co-founder at Infectious Media. “We’ve even started building Adloox metrics into our optimisation algorithms.”

The verification data is there. But it needs to be made more available, transparently. Too many industry touch points are either resisting this, or just not paying enough attention in class.