How I hacked programmatic campaigns with FouAnalytics
The first and most important aspect of running a campaign using programmatic media is to show your ads to humans.
The chart above is an example of a campaign run by a large holding company media agency. As you can see 90% of the ads are not shown to humans but to bots (dark red). The advertiser client doesn't know there's a problem because the legacy fraud vendor they use still shows ">99% fraud/SIVT free" ads (dashboard below). Clearly the agency and client are both being misled by the faulty fraud verification tech they paid for, but that doesn't protect them from the fraud. I won't belabor the point about how bad legacy vendors' tech is here, but check this article if you want more details of why they keep reporting only 1% IVT.
Also, remember this example where I bought 1 billion programmatic ads with my own money (1 cent CPMs) to check for bad sites and apps?
If you know how to buy programmatic ads you will get your ads in front of humans. The following is my campaign. The display ads were purchased through DV360. Note the amount of dark blue; and this is in-ad measurement. If you use FouAnalytics in-ad tags to measure your programmatic campaigns, I can show you how to do this too. Not only can you SAVE a ton of money by avoiding showing ads to bots and other forms of fraud, you can also significantly increase the percentage of your ads shown to humans (what we can confirm as dark blue).
You can then also check the effectiveness of this kind of media buying by checking the attentiveness of the humans that click through to your site. In other words, did those humans (dark blue) do anything else when they arrived on your landing pages?
Humans that deliberately clicked on your ad will usually do something else once they arrive on your site. If you see 100% bounce rates, or zero time on site, you already know something is wrong and those are not valuable visitors. Finally, you can compare the attentiveness of the humans against other paid channels and more importantly against "direct traffic" (yellow highlight below). Did the users you get from paid channels over-index or under-index those that came to your site directly? Advanced marketers can then optimize for attentiveness, for example by re-allocating budget across different types of ads -- i.e. more budget to paid media that delivers highest human and highest attentiveness.
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Message me to use FouAnalytics in-ad tags to check your own campaigns. And message me so I can show you how to run your own campaigns with 80%+ dark blue in-ad.
Ad-Fraud Investigator & Media Expert, member of Digital Forensic Research Lab cohort "Digital Sherlocks" - Adding some fun when asking unexpected questions you were not prepared to hear
1 年I can confirm it. I use #fouanalytics since almost 10yrs and have learnt everything I know about Fraud from Dr. Augustine Fou ! Clients are shocked when they realize how much money they could save by just optimizing their campaigns according to the results we gather from #fouanalytics. Especially when comparing won bids and their cpm vs. what their agencies ask for. Forensic analysis is the real way of doing audits.