A recent study has indicated that about one third of impressions from programmatic mobile ads could be fraudulent.
According to research conducted by AppLift, a mobile marketing ad technology company, and Forensiq, a security company, 34 percent of programmatic mobile ad impressions are at risk of being fake.
These are the types of ads served from an exchanged to a publisher site exchange in real time based on target data.
Throughout the study, it was revealed that about 22 percent were considered to be “suspect” of being fraudulent. Moreover, an additional 12 percent were considered to be at “high risk” of having been fraudulent. This mobile marketing insight could place a considerable amount of doubt on the effectiveness of various mobile advertising strategies and of the use of these types of ads in the first place.
The mobile marketing study used data that ran from September 21 through October 19 this year.
The research looked into the bid requests on ad impressions that ran on the DataLift and AppLift platforms during that period of one month, earlier this year. Thomas Sommer from AppLift explained that “Through our technology, we listen to the impressions and analyze the bid requests from the exchanges,” adding that “The bid requests comes with different parameters from users seeing the ad, which are dependent on things like: device, time of day, phone model, etc.”
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the primary trade group for the advertising industry, recently issued a report containing the results of its own research. Within it, it indicated that ad fraud in all its forms, including in mobile advertising, was currently coming at an annual cost of $8.2 billion in the United States. Of that figure, mobile ad fraud contributed an estimated $1.3 billion in cost.
According to a mobile marketing prediction from eMarketer, mobile programmatic media buying is going to break the $20.45 billion mark by the close of 2017. When taking into account the size of the figure that represents fraud in that category, it is highly concerning to the industry that about a third of its spend is being paid into the cost of fraud.
