Beyond Averages with FouAnalytics

If you are seeing monthly reports with rolled up averages of KPIs, you aren't getting the full story and you're missing the ad fraud. This is because ad fraud can easily hide in the averages.

You probably know that any metric that's too high or too low is suspicious, but even when the metric meets your benchmark things may not be as they seem. The metrics you see in monthly digital media reports are averaged across all the domains and line items in the campaign. With any averaged metric, there's some portion of the dataset that falls above the average and some portion that falls below. Relying on averaged metrics can be misleading because they hide the nuance and outliers in the data.

You only need to buy the right amount impressions from MFA sites that have 95% viewability combined with the right amount of impressions from crappy mobile apps that have 0% viewability to achieve 70% average viewability. If you see a monthly report from your legacy verification company with 70% average campaign viewability, it likely wouldn't raise any red flags for you. And, what will you do with that information? If you incorrectly assume that the data is normally distributed and that most of the sites had 70% viewability, then you'll likely do nothing with that information. That data point is not very useful because it doesn't tell you whether there were significant outliers skewing the average.

Now consider that bad guys could be falsifying metrics entirely, but you wouldn't know that if you don't have access to domain-level reporting as well as the supporting data to verify the calculations yourself.

The same can be said for many other digital media metrics like completion rate, CTR, bounce rate, etc. These are all averaged across the campaign, but without line item and domain level details you don't have the context you need to understand what to do next. Legacy verification companies rely on these averaged metrics to give you a sense of false security. Post-bid analytics allows you to understand what makes up your 70% average viewability (or any other averaged metric) by showing you the supporting data. This way you can verify that the ads were in view, for more than 1 second on an active browser and weren't stuffed into 0x0 ad slots or somewhere off-page. With FouAnalytics you have access to the supporting data you need to make better decisions.

If you want better analytics you have to ditch the legacy verification companies that hide important details from you. Let me know if you'd like to trial FouAnalytics. It only takes a few minutes to install the tag in your ad server or DSP.