Still No Mercy for Fraud: Banned Campaigns 2023 [Infographics]
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The cost of digital advertising fraud worldwide was estimated at approximately 88 billion US dollars in 2023. Meanwhile, this number used to be 65 billion in 2021, so the fraud is obviously growing…
…and becoming more and more sophisticated. However, ad fraud combating methods are developing, too. We at PropellerAds know it for sure: our Policy Team has caught more than 1k advertisers who tried to skirt the rules!
Thanks to constant campaign monitoring, automated anti-fraud systems, and manual checks, our Policy heroes have prevented thousands of illegal, fraudulent, or non-ethic campaigns from going live and doing harm to users.
To share these insights with you, we prepared our traditional annual digest on how we moderate campaigns and unmercifully get rid of any fraud and scam.
Enjoy!
Banned Advertisers by Type
Like in previous years, cloaking and multi-accounting persist as the primary causes leading to account bans. Surely, our policy team has found and unarmed them all!
The other reasons include creating campaigns with fake tech support and failed KYC, as well as a range of other rules abuse, such as landing pages with malware.
Rejected Campaigns by Type
The situation here is also pretty much the same as the last year. The top reason for popular rejection (30% of all campaigns) is adult content that is not acceptable in any form. You can check our Policies to get more information regarding the requirements we apply.
Another popular reason for campaign rejection is copyright infringement (17%). A reminder: it is restricted to use a logo, style, or even fonts of the rightsholders that didn’t give you direct consent for this. It is considered a prohibited practice to mimic or imitate another person’s copyrighted style in a manner that causes confusion, and our policy team will immediately reject such a campaign. And, by the way, using celebrities’ faces without their permission is also a no-go!
Misleading content involves various actions, from false notifications like ‘Your computer is infected’ to imitating system messages. Such campaigns made up 13% of the whole rejection reasons.
Restricted products (12%) can be about more or less normal campaigns with no restricted content, but the issue arises when advertisers try to promote goods or services that are controlled substances by nature.
The other reasons involve phishing, scams, malware, and other policy violations. Whatever the reason is, a campaign can be restored after we reject it if you fix the issues we found during the approval session.
GEOs
This year, Turkey, Brazil, and India became the most vulnerable GEOs to fraud, with the most rule violation cases. However, this might be related to the overall rise of these GEOs’ popularity.
To Sum Up
We keep standing on the outlook of the campaigns 24/7 – as well as our partners, who make their input into fighting fraud by informing us of rule violations they come across. Our support inbox is always open for your alerts, too!
Stay on the safe side with PropellerAds, and see you soon!
