GUANGZHOU, China, May 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Ad fraud has become one of the greatest threats facing the fast-growing global mobile ad market. The Ad Anti-Fraud White Paper 2.0, published by Mobvista, takes a close look at the current state of mobile ad fraud, fraud types, and anti-fraud strategies, intending to improve the transparency and health of the mobile ad industry.
This year, the global economy is gripped by uncertainty as the Covid-19 pandemic continues its worldwide rampage. Among the hardest hit is the ad industry, known as a gauge of economic activity. Advertisers’ budgets plunged as a result of the crisis, which is worsened by increasingly rampant ad fraud.
Mobile ad fraud is defined as any technology-enabled attempt to defraud advertisers, publishers, or suppliers to steal advertising budgets. According to the World Federation of Advertisers’ statistics, a conservative estimate is that ad fraud costs advertisers more than USD 20 billion in 2019. This number is expected to rise to a whopping USD 50 billion by 2025. Aside from causing advertisers heavy economic losses, ad fraud erodes the value and credibility of mobile ads and therefore hamstrings the sustainable development of the mobile ad industry.
Recent years have seen a rise in mobile ad fraud. According to a statistical analysis done by Mobvista’s anti-fraud team, from October 2019 to March 2020, ad fraud detected accounted for 10.69% of total ad traffic worldwide. All participants of the mobile ad industry must pull together to combat the growth in fraudulent ad traffic.
Behind the increase in ad fraud lie the ever more sophisticated fraud techniques. The 2020 anti-fraud white paper published by Mobvista introduces the latest strategies to combat the evolving fraud threat.
Mobvista’s multi-tiered anti-fraud system, led by its anti-fraud team, integrates with third-party fraud detection platforms and other anti-fraud technology providers. It is essentially an anti-fraud toolkit with Mobvista’s proprietary anti-fraud technology at its heart, and it is constantly expanding to adapt to newly identified fraud features. So far, Mobvista has classified more than 60 fraud features and is continually identifying new ones from the latest industry research to optimize its rule-based anti-fraud system.
The white paper also demonstrates a selection of anti-fraud solutions.
As fraud techniques evolve, the industry needs to develop more sophisticated fraud detection technology, said the group’s vice president Dr. Zhu Yadong. Mobvista’s machine learning-based anti-fraud solutions can effectively stop the spread of fraudulent ad traffic by automatically extracting potential or new fraud patterns from masses of data.
Moreover, to tackle the situation where fraudsters combine click spamming traffic with bo traffic to improve channel CVR and shorten CTIT, Mobvista included mobile device brands into their statistics to split up the original traffic indicators and see the real situation.