Dive Brief:

• Barometric, a cross-platform media tracking company, released a free tool called Clean Score for publishers to monitor the traffic to their site and filter it from reporting invalid traffic, according to a press release made available to Marketing Dive. Invalid traffic includes things such as fraudulent clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate publishers' numbers and thus increase advertising costs and publishers' revenue.
• Clean Score intends to let publishers position their traffic in the most accurate light, driving higher cost per thousand impressions and maximizing their advertising revenue through analyzing historical reports of invalid traffic trends and breaking down where publishers' clicks are coming from. Clean Score is already being used by publishers like Render Media, a Los Angeles-based company that owns several fast-growing digital titles including Cooking Panda and Opposing Views.

• "Invalid traffic is a huge issue for new media publishers like us, and for our valued advertising partners. We see tens of millions of unique monthly visitors to our sites every month," Vic Belonogoff, CEO, Render Media, said in a statement. "Preventing and addressing invalid traffic is essential to maintaining the integrity of our platforms — it's imperative that we create a safe environment for advertisers and give them real, transparent metrics." 

Dive Insight:

Digital ad fraud has long been a problem in the industry, but a number of reports over the past year or so, including the discovery of the Russian bot farm operation Methbot, have highlighted the scale of the threat and how it directly siphons off millions of dollars from advertisers and premium publishers. Barometric offering more transparent metrics and a better view into invalid traffic should be appealing, as the platform is accredited through the Media Rating Council's strict guidelines.

More marketers are demanding third-party accreditation from industry watchdogs like the MRC as part of a broader push to more comprehensively standardize and clean up the digital media supply chain. For publishers, Clean Score's ability to weed out invalid traffic goes a long way toward establishing their inventory as clean and worthy of premium ad dollars. 

"Clean Score is the best tool we have for achieving that, because we're able to proactively monitor and address IVT [invalid traffic]," Belonogoff said.

Barometric isn't alone in moving to offer more proactive and comprehensive solutions to digital fraud. White Ops and The Trade Desk announced a deal last month for a solution that will scan every impression on inventory before advertisers bid on that media space. The partnership is a new development in ad fraud detection by vetting the inventory on the platform from the supply side.