Most solutions to ad fraud were FREE and obvious

Twelve years ago, I decided NOT to become a fraud detection company. Why? Because if you solved ad fraud, there would be nothing more to get paid to detect. Fraud detection companies have an incentive NOT to solve ad fraud. Sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. Think about it for a second. If YOU were running an ad fraud detection company, would you want to solve ad fraud and put yourself out of business? Of course not. You do have to show some results like detecting and blocking 1% of the fraud. But you wouldn't want to solve ad fraud completely, because you want to stay in business and grow revenue.

See: Save $1 billion right now (2 legacy fraud verification vendors earn $1 billion per year in revenue for NOT protecting you from most of the ad fraud)

Another thing a fraud detection vendor wouldn't do is tell you the obvious and free ways to solve fraud, like "turn off Pangle" (the audience network of TikTok) to solve 99% of the obvious fraud from that channel. If you had analytics in place and could see that ALL of the clicks from utm_source=tiktok were NOT coming from TikTok, but from other crapps (crappy mobile apps), you'd turn off Pangle right away to ensure your ads ran only on TikTok and get real impact for your business. That's an obvious and free solution to ad fraud and click fraud that your fraud detection vendors won't tell you, so they can stay relevant.

Legacy fraud detection vendors won't tell you these obvious solutions to fraud because they want you to keep paying them for their services. Instead, they'd give you nice-looking dashboards and gigantic Excel spreadsheets to make it look like they were delivering value for the millions of dollars you were paying them. But if you saw 1% IVT ("invalid traffic") in the spreadsheets, what do you do? What COULD you do? Nothing. Those stats and numbers are entirely useless to actually solving ad fraud.

If you had analytics in your digital ads, and saw the following details -- that 80% of the CTV ads you bought from Samsung were running on crap websites like bestlifeonline or lifestyle-a2z -- you'd be pissed. You paid high CTV prices for ads that didn't run on large connected Samsung TV screens, but instead in small ad slots on shady sites. You'd call up your rep and threaten to pull all spend unless they turned off that undisclosed "audience extension." The solution to this fraud or waste is obvious and free, if you had the right analytics to "see Fou yourself."

Another example of an obvious and free solution to fraud is to UNCHECK LinkedIn Audience Network. That should take you about 10 seconds to locate it in the LinkedIn user interface and 1 second to uncheck that checkbox.

Once you turn off LinkedIn Audience Network, you would have avoided 100% of the fraud that comes from bad sites and apps that you see below. You bought ads on LinkedIn but your ads ran on the apps and sites outside of LinkedIn. These crapps even clicked through to your landing page in order to trick LinkedIn's algorithms into allocating more ads and budget to them. Algorithms use basic signals like the number of clicks and click through rates to optimize; bad sites and apps have higher click rates (due to fraud) and the algorithms faithfully send more of your ads and budget to bad guys.

How many more examples do I need to show you before you are convinced that legacy fraud detection vendors don't want to solve ad fraud completely and won't tell you obvious and free ways to solve most of the fraud in your campaigns, so you continue to pay them for (useless) detection services. Another obvious and free solution is to move away from block lists, because there are simply too many bad sites and apps to block, to inclusion lists. The smaller and tighter your inclusion lists, the more fraud you avoid to begin with. Humans go to a handful of sites over and over again. Those are the sites that have large human audiences. Humans also use a handful of mobile apps and stream from a finite number of CTV channels and apps. Add those to your inclusion lists to avoid most of the fraud and waste.

As the title of this article said, most solutions to ad fraud and waste WERE obvious and free. It's just that the adtech industrial complex didn't want you to know or do those because they had something to sell you. Legacy fraud detection vendors want you to keep paying for fraud detection, so they don't want to solve fraud and won't tell you obvious and free ways to avoid 99% of the fraud to begin with.

Most solutions to ad fraud and waste ARE obvious and free, still. I am happy to share those free and obvious recommendations with you, because I don't rely on ad fraud to continue to make a living. You are also welcome to use FouAnalytics on your sites and in your ads, so you can also "see Fou yourself."

But, alas, you may still be wondering whether you need FouAnalytics, if you've already done all of the free and obvious things above, and avoided most of the fraud already. To answer that question, I've already written another article (with screen shots and examples) -- Do you still need FouAnalytics if ..

Read on, intrepid adfraud fighter and optimizer of digital campaigns! ;-)

Happy Saturday, Y'all!