A new report from unified marketing analytics system Singular provides a look at the use of mobile ad fraud prevention by marketers and ad networks.
In its analysis, the company found that 63 percent of marketers don’t have fraud prevention tools enabled in their mobile marketing systems (often fraud prevention is a premium service that costs more). Nearly 70 percent of the mobile ad fraud attempts stopped monthly were attribution manipulation, in which the perpetrators try to take credit for app installs from organic and paid traffic sources. When fraudulent click attribution is successful, marketers can end up allocating budget to the scammers’ sources and away from the sources that are actually driving real installs.
“Fraud is still a major problem for mobile marketers — and part of the blame lies with the analytics industry,” said Singular CEO and founder Gadi Eliashiv in a statement. “Third-party analytics providers treat fraud prevention as a luxury, offering it to marketers as a ‘premium’ add-on rather than a free feature embedded in the platform. Equally problematic is the complexity of existing fraud offerings — for instance, attribution platforms that place the burden on marketers to run their own statistical analysis to detect fraud.”
One method of attribution fraud is via click injection, Eliashiv explained in an interview last week. When a user downloads a new app, a malicious app in the background on the user’s phone sends info to the newly downloaded app’s attribution system to make it appear that the install came from that app source by registering a fake click when the user opens the new app for the first time. “Some of these [malicious] apps have 100 millions of users,” said Eliashiv.
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