Dive Brief:
- "Fighting Mobile Fraud in the Programmatic Era," a new study by mobile ad tech firm AppLift and fraud prevention platform Forensiq, found that CPC and CPI campaigns were both less likely to be fraudulent than CPM campaigns, and that overall 34% of mobile programmatic traffic is at risk of fraud.
- An interesting finding from the research was mobile ad fraud increases at night because fraud tactics aren’t sophisticated enough to take actual app usage into account.
- AppLift CEO and Co-Founder Tim Koschella said in a statement, “The cost of advertising plays a significant role in mobile marketers’ budgets. The rise in fraudulent activity not only undermines the integrity of the advertising industry, but it is extremely costly for advertisers.”
Dive Insight:
Koschella told Marketing Dive, “The main focus and reason behind the report was to raise awareness about fraud in mobile in general and for programmatic in particular, provide educational insights, but also show that there are effective ways to fight it.”
He added, “Overall, our goal was not to put the blame on any specific publishers or any other stakeholders of the ecosystem. We believe that the fight against fraud should be everyone’s responsibility, both on the demand and on the supply side.”
EMarketer predicts U.S. mobile programmatic media will reach more than $20 billion by 2017, making mobile programmatic fraud a concern for marketers. In the study, AppLift’s DataLift fraud detection system found one-third of all mobile traffic at risk of fraud, with that figure broken into two categories of ad fraud: suspected fraud and high-risk fraud. Twenty-two percent of overall mobile traffic was found to be suspected of fraud and 12% deemed high-risk of fraud.
