Fraud Shall Not Pass: How We Control Partners’ Traffic Quality?
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Brands, agencies, and affiliates strive to reach maximum profit with their promo campaigns. Obviously, this cannot be possible without high-quality traffic sources. Digital advertising requires serious protective technologies to keep fraud away from your campaigns.
That is why PropellerAds has developed a multilayer solution stack that helps us detect invalid activity and protect our partners from ad fraud. If you want to know how exactly we do that, then this post is for you. So…
What do we mean by “ad fraud”?
In short, we mean bots, malware, clickjacking, ad stacking, and other illegitimate activity that can steal your budget and harm your reputation.
Being a large multisource ad platform with numerous traffic sources, we know how important it is to check each of them carefully and reassure that our partners get only the purest traffic. Let’s get to the point now.
Step 1: Supply partners’ inventory
The very first step we make towards exceptional quality is checking a supply partners’ inventory. All the inventory is carefully moderated regarding rules from our Terms and Conditions. In short, the criteria are:
- All partners’ supply must be functional, complete, and content-based – we don’t accept any “under construction” sources stuffed with links/ads.
- No illegal content allowed: racial, ethnic, political, and other hatred; money-making offers prohibited by the law; gratuitous violence; illegal goods and activities; hacking and phreaking; pirating software.
- No false/unofficial information aimed to bring physical or mental harm.
- Spoofing or redirecting from adult sources is strictly prohibited.
We have in-house software to check the supply partners’ inventory automatically and decline those that don’t meet our rules + the rest of the sources pass manual moderation.
If we approve the source and allow locating our ads there, we start checking partners’ traffic itself.
Step 2: Partners’ traffic analysis
Our Policy team monitors and analyzes partners’ traffic to make sure that it complies with business criteria. PropellerAds’ uses advanced technologies to check the partners’ traffic for bots and ad fraud.
There is a wide range of patterns our Policy has. They are flexible and advanced enough to automatically detect and block cheaters. The variety of tools is wide, but the essence cannot be uncovered, since the details of the technological layout would help fraudsters get around the defense.
Step 3: Manual check
Our Policy team also opts for manual checks for certain traffic partners and their supply quality. This is especially the case if we receive requests from our advertisers or/and our experts find a double-check necessary. Another case is when we receive reports from our advertisers who request an additional traffic check.
In such a situation, the Policy team carefully checks the supply manually to evaluate the quality by numerous parameters and make the right decision. Please make sure that you are familiar with the Policies before launching a campaign.
Which tools do we use?
We use both – an in-house anti-fraud system and solutions provided by ADEX, the fraud prevention and protection tool. Specifically, ADEX is able to check traffic in the real-time and detect numerous types of invalid activity, blocking bots and fraud automatically. ADEX checks traffic by multiple parameters, including user behavior patterns. Harmful and potentially-harmful activity is being blocked or redirected to the blank page instead of reaching your ad campaigns.
In turn, in-house tools are aimed at traffic filtering, which adds another security level to the tracking processes.
Based on the reports from both systems, our Policy team decides if any ad placements should be deactivated. Regarding the situation, our experts also check the supply partner for reliability and take measures if necessary.
So, we keep an eye on traffic purity 24/7, and you can rest assured that no fraudsters will gulp your budget or seriously affect ad performance.
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