AGENCIES Replace Fraud Verification, Upgrade to FouAnalytics

“We’ve advised our clients to use the various analytics platforms (think Adalytics and Fou Analytics) versus the so-called ad verification companies,” said Jay Friedman, CEO of independent media and marketing services firm Goodway Group.

We've come full circle. Not only have ADVERTISERS replaced legacy fraud verification with FouAnalytics so they can "see Fou themselves" better, the AGENCIES that serve them are also replacing legacy fraud verification with FouAnalytics. Quoting an agency team lead from yesterday's call, "this is the best analytics we've seen for digital ads, and it doesn't come from the platforms themselves. The additional details in FouAnalytics allow us to understand why something is bad and why something is good, so we can do a better job managing campaigns for our clients." This is especially gratifying for me to hear, especially after a decade of fighting with agencies about whether fraud was 1% or more than 1%.

Advertisers and agencies realize that the 1% invalid traffic ("IVT") that they were told by legacy vendors was not all the fraud there is. It's likely that it was "all the fraud they could catch;" and the actual fraud levels were far higher. Intuitively, folks knew this when they observed nearly 100% bounce rates and nearly 0 seconds time on site coming from paid ads. But they didn't have the detailed analytics to know why and see where the fraud was coming from until they deployed FouAnalytics.

In most cases, the agencies deploy the FouAnalytics in-ad tags in campaigns so they can see where the ads are going and whether some form of fraud caused the ads to load. Keep in mind that ad fraud is not just bots anymore. Ad fraud comes from all sorts of shady tech and techniques, employed by shady publishers. For example, ad stacking (sticking dozens of ads in the same ad slot), pixel stuffing (sticking ads in 0x0 or 1x1 windows, which obvs can't be seen), ad slot refreshing (loading new ads every 1 second), forced redirects (redirecting users to additional pages even though they were not ready to go to the next page), etc.

Who do you trust more for the accuracy of digital media measurement?

The polls below were run more than 1 year apart. The first poll result was from a year ago. And the second poll result was from this week. I asked folks "Who do you trust more for the accuracy of digital media verification?" What do you all think?

Global agencies using FouAnalytics in place of legacy fraud verification

See three examples of global agencies and agency groups that have adopted FouAnalytics in place of legacy fraud verification and use it across all clients' campaigns to more closely monitor and manage the campaigns.

After the basic work of reducing ad fraud, agencies do more advanced optimizations

The agencies that have already adopted FouAnalytics have already optimized their campaigns away from ad fraud (dark red in FouAnalytics). Once they have reduced the fraud (minimized the dark red), they can optimize towards humans (increase the ads shown to dark blue). Once the ads are shown to humans, agencies can start to optimize for attentiveness -- whether users that arrived on the landing pages of the advertisers did anything else. Obviously if a human chose to click on an ad, when they arrive on the landing page, they will take some kind of action. This is the opposite of "high bounce" and "low time on site." Advanced advertisers and agencies are even using relative attentiveness on the landing pages to A/B test ad creatives. The more memorable and impactful the ad creative, the more attentive the users are when they get to the landing page. And obviously attentive users on the landing page are a step towards the conversion. This works well for ecommerce sites, but it also works well for CPG companies that sell goods in offline stores.

More screenshots and case examples of clients using FouAnalytics: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/augustinefou/recent-activity/newsletter/