With the growth of digital marketing, ad fraud, viewability, and ad blocking remain significant issues for marketers and advertisers. Fraud has no limits and moves across marketing channels, whether desktop, mobile, or social media. Several brands faced ad fraud running on different channels with objectionable content. On one side, where desktop ad fraud has reduced, mobile app violations are increasing.
What are Ad Fraud, Viewability, and Ad Blocking?
The term “ad fraud” refers to the false or negative representation of digital advertisements, clicks, and conversions to earn revenue. On the contrary, viewability is the metric in online advertising used to track ad impressions viewed by real humans. Ad blocking, also known as ad filtering, implements the software capability to prevent online advertisements on a web page. One can also practice ad blocking through browser extensions or other methods. Ad fraud, viewability, and ad blocking seem similar but are different from each other. 
Non-Human Traffic (NTF) and Invalid Traffic (IVT)
Another term for no-human and invalid traffic is bots and software programs. The botmaster remotely controls these bots to load web pages, scrolling pages, fake house movements, and prevent fraud detection. Bots earn billions of dollars by generating ad impressions by web page loading and exchanging them with advertisers who want huge volume and high performance.
Mobile emulators create bots that perform downloading, installing, and mobile utilization for ad fraud commitment. These bots also perform various activities, including login and password harvesting, recording motions and touch events, and listening to private conversations.
You might wonder how these bots can access your personal information or conversation. For example, the flashlight app may ask permission to turn on your microphone. Many online sellers do not wait for human visits; they buy traffic through ad fraud, viewability, and ad blocking.
Ad Stacking and Pixel Stuffing
People involved in ad fraud, viewability, and ad blocking focus on earning money as soon as possible and do not get stuck on a single website. Instead, they use ad stacking, where they stack 10 to 20 ads on top of each other in a single ad slot. This method increases the number of ads they sell for each web page loading due to bot traffic.
Advertisers bidding on ads cannot duplicate bid requests twice and drive bid prices when they bid against themselves. This ad stacking and pixel stuffing method generates higher profit for fake websites.
Forced Redirects
Another dominant fraudster behavior is that they are impatient and do not wait for organic visits. Instead, they prefer forced redirects and visits to their fake websites. They use pop-ups and pop-unders to get forced visits to their sites. These actions do not involve any humans, and redirects are part of an automated process.
The malicious codes are used on web pages and added into ad slots as malicious ads. Pop-ups and pop-unders automatically load web pages humans do not want to visit intentionally. Ad frauds, cookie stuffing, or affiliate frauds use the tactics of page loading. The extent to which the traffic is redirected to a webpage is not specific but can increase the page views.
Falsifying
Fraudsters usually cover their tracks and become undiscoverable to continue practicing fraud operations for a longer period. They use residential proxy services to bounce their bot traffic and disguise the data center as residential. This method prevents standard fraud detection. Moreover, the bots used for traffic generation and website clicks are represented well.
Fraudsters also modify viewability features to make non-viewed ads look fresh. Through this step, fraudsters ensure that all the fake ads are 100 % viewable most of the time. By falsifying the placement reports, they enable ads to appear on legitimate websites.
Viewability
Even though every marketer invests in viewability measurement, some viewability measures are fake or incorrect. Instead of spending money, you can use JavaScript analytics to measure viewability. Remember that you cannot measure human users’ viewability if your browser tab is inactive. Fraudsters are skilled enough to modify these measurements. It is better to measure viewability by yourself when you have opportunities.
Ad Blocking
Most humans do not like ads; even if they do not hate them, they are annoyed by their quantity and irrelevancy. To avoid these irrelevant ads, people install and use ad blockers. However, bots do not block these ads and reload them. It is a drawback of ad fraud, viewability, and ad blocking that these blocked ads generate revenue for many sellers.
Digital advertising is continuously evolving, but the challenges regarding ad fraud, viewability, and blocking remain central. Fraudsters continue to earn money through different digital mediums, but their fraud practices will not make digital advertising ineffective.
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