It’s a story that just won’t go away and having hogged the headlines for much of 2015, the topic of ad fraud looks set to carry over well into 2016 if a survey carried out by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the USA is anything to go by.
Research carried out by the ANA in association with White Opps, the digital advertising security specialist, noted that ad fraud could cost American advertisers anything up to $7.2 billion in 2016. Yes, that’s $7.2 billion and it’s a figure that is significantly up on the estimated $6.3 billion in 2015.
According to the report, around one in ten display ads were being viewed by bots while this narrowed to around one in four video ads which themselves attract premium pricing, providing an even bigger incentive for fraudsters.
According to the ANA the findings highlighted “the need for the entire marketing ecosystem to manage their media investments with far greater discipline and control against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated fraudsters”.
Michael Tiffany, CEO of White Opps added that part of the problem is attributable to the fact that many advertisers buy from ad exchanges that sell space non-premium websites where fraud levels are likely to be much greater.
