Top ways marketers can fight location-based ad fraud

According to research, ad fraud is cost marketers roughly £1.89 billion globally in the first half of the year. It has been said that by 2025 the amount of fraudulent activity is estimated at £38 billion annually. That is basically millions of pounds being wasted on ads that are not seen each day.

Furthermore, it only seems to be getting worse as location data becomes more important. If you take the cookie tracking as an example, it is slowly fading away and alternative ways of measuring digital marketing activities will become more important and some of these like geo-testing will rely on the use of location-based ad targeting.

Below are the top ways you can fight location-based ad fraud:

You shouldn’t rely on location-based targeting – Location-based targeting shouldn’t be ignored, understanding that it isn’t favourable even when fraud is not taken in consideration. Marketers should consider how they utilise it as the benefits of location-based still drives sales.

You should think about if the user’s location is a necessity. For example a retail campaign targeting winter clothing to people who live in the colder regions, whereas if location is used as a proxy, then it might be the case for an ad campaign targeting postcodes/ZIP codes associated with high net worth people.

Also using location as a proxy, it can be good exploring alternative approaches. Using high net worth people as an example, marketers might find that the target audience can be reached more effectively and with less risk through carefully-selected private marketplaces selling inventory from specific publishers rather than using a location proxy.

Sweat the bidstream details – Many location-targeted ads are being purchased in the Real Time Payments (RTP) ecosystem. So the location information, when present is described in the bidstream’s geo data object. Although there is nothing that actually stops scammers from misrepresenting the data in the geo data object, listening carefully to the contents could be very useful. One of the geo data object fields is kind and describes where the location data actually came from. Some sources, like GPS, are accurate and more exact than others, like IP address.

It’s important for marketers to concentrate as to whether the geo knowledge object is related to the consumer or system. The former represents where the individual using the device is determined to be primarily based while the latter represents the place the system at present is bodily.

So if you are opting not to use location-based targeting when the data associated with inventory isn’t accurate or precise enough, you can at least ensure that you are not losing out to fraud on inventory that was of more limited value.

Use requirements to avoid typically suspect advertisements – There are various ways of Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) requirements that you can use to reduce ad fraud. The requirements that you can use include ads.txt, app-ads.txt and ads.cert. Although none of the requirements actually directly address the fraudulent location data, but there is actually an argument that can be made to utilise those requirements from the bad ads, marketers can find out which of them are location fraud.

Know the capabilities of your DSPs – When you have recognised that fraud together with location data misrepresentation is a huge problem, many demand-side platform (DSPs) have implemented technologies aimed at detecting suspicious inventory and preventing their clients from buying it.

As these applied sciences are operating within the background and don’t require any effort on the part of media buyers, you shouldn’t assume that your DSPs are utilizing the most effective tech to guard you. So instead, you should ask their DSPs to detail how they fight fraud, that also includes fraud relating to location data, and where appropriate, advocate for change.

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