Advertisers, get moooaaarrr from your digital ads! Here's How

I've been showing advertisers that ad fraud is way more than 1% for years. I have also showed them that their ads are getting in front of little more than 1% humans for years. Few would listen, because it was just too hard to believe. Besides, it would be embarrassing to admit you had been wasting money unknowingly for years.

OK, so let me take a different approach here. I know that everyone loves a good deal. Everyone loves to get more for their money. And everyone loves to shop at Costco. So let me put ad fraud mitigation and optimization of your digital ad spend in those terms.

Double your order

Who wouldn't want to get two Big Macs for the price of one? Who wouldn't want to get two months of streaming for the price of one? etc. etc. If you currently buy digital ads through programmatic channels, at least half of every dollar goes to adtech intermediaries, whether they "add value" or not, instead of to publishers. Don't take my word for it. Repeated studies by industry trade bodies since 2014, the four listed in the slide below plus a fifth in the works now, show that only 50% of advertisers dollars go to publishers for showing ads. Put another way, if you bought ads directly from publishers, you'd effectively double your order -- i.e. you'd get double the number of ad impressions because more of your dollar goes to showing ads instead of to lining intermediaries' and fraudsters' pockets.

I can hear the collective chorus of "that's not possible" and "we can't buy ads that way any more." Let me show you how to easily do this using the existing ad platforms: 1) start using an inclusion list of domains and apps that are known to be good and are known to have human audiences (if you need help with this, I already have these inclusion lists); 2) dramatically reduce the number of ad exchanges you use in the programmatic buys, this reduces the leakage, fraud, and waste in programmatic supply chains.

An even more ideal scenario is to buy self-serve from the publisher where possible or buy the specific publisher domain(s) through the one or two exchanges the publisher prefers to use. Note that PMPs ("private marketplaces") don't do this for you, since all the intermediaries still take their cut and the quality of the PMP is only as good as the crappy sites that belong to it.

Do you want to "double your order" of ad impressions for the same amount of budget? Of course you do; everyone loves a good deal.

Double your conversions

Everyone also loves to get more for their money.?In the slide below, I show an example of how advertisers can correct conversion rates that are artificially depressed by bot traffic. Because the conversion rate is calculated from conversions divided by traffic, if the denominator -- traffic -- is artificially inflated due to bot traffic, the conversion rate is lower than expected. By identifying the amount of non-converting bot traffic and subtracting that from the denominator, advertisers are able to make their conversion rate calculations more accurate. Note that this nominally changes the conversion rate; but also, identifying where the bot traffic is coming from enables advertisers to turn those fraudulent media sources off, or at the very least reduce budgets allocated to them, thus making their campaigns better overall. Do you want to get more for your money? Of course you do.

25-fold your humans

Finally, everyone loves to shop at Costco. Even though they have to buy far too much toilet paper and paper towels to get the best unit price possible, they are willing to do it, and just find extra storage in their house for Kirkland paper towels and toilet paper stacked to the ceiling.

The difference between bulk products purchased for the lowest unit price at Costco versus digital ads is that the former is real and tangible, while the latter may be entirely faked. You certainly don't want to buy fake toilet paper, right? When you buy toilet paper, you expect it to be real; otherwise, you'd be stuck in a real predicament. Buying digital ads right now is like buying fake toilet paper, where you're not getting what you paid for, or only getting 1 - 4% of what you paid for. See the donut charts in the slide above from six programmatic campaigns. It shows that 1 - 4% of the clicks from these campaigns are humans (dark blue). That's like getting 1 - 4% of the toilet paper you thought you bought. That's pretty disturbing.

If you're going to buy in bulk, the most important thing is to verify that the product is real, like toilet paper. In digital ads, the way to verify it's real is to actually measure for humans, not just detect for fraud. If you buy from real publishers that have real human audiences, you will get you ads in front of far more than 1 - 4% humans; in fact you can "25-fold your humans" (imagine showing 100% of your ads to humans, instead of 4%). Using the simple techniques mentioned above, like use inclusion lists and reduce number of exchanges, you will be able to 25-fold the humans that see your ads. The single most important factor to the effectiveness of digital ads is showing them to humans. Nothing else matters, of your ads are not shown to humans in the first place.

Advertisers, do you want to get moooaaarrr? Yes? Good. Everyone loves a good deal. Make sure you are actually getting a good deal in digital ads by using FouAnalytics to check. Happy Sunday, and happy shopping for real digital ads.

Further reading:

Optimize towards humans, not just away from bots

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/percent-fraud-wrong-way-assess-quality-use-human-dr-augustine

How Site-Owners Use FouAnalytics to Troubleshoot Bot Traffic

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-site-owners-use-fouanalytics-troubleshoot-bot-dr-augustine

How to use FouAnalytics to Scrutinize Clicks from Programmatic Campaigns

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-use-fouanalytics-scrutinize-clicks-from-programmatic-fou