Use PageXray by FouAnalytics to Catch MFA and fraud sites
PageXray by FouAnalytics is a free tool you can use to scan websites. It is based on a headless chrome browser (crawler) and it allows all of the javascript to execute. It takes a screen shot of the website or page and highlights the ads with a green outline. You will notice that some of the ads are not on the page. These are called off-page ads, and MFA ("made for advertising") sites have a lot of these. That's how they can load hundreds of ads per page, but appear to be loading only a handful when manually inspected. You won't see these hidden ads when you look at the page yourself.
PageXray tree graph of ad and tracker calls
PageXray also plots the javascript calls in a tree graph to show "what called what." In the following example, we only see 4 levels in the tree graph. But over the years, I have observed fraudulent sites have 10 or more levels. In other words, they continuously call more ads and trackers into the page. And all of this is not visible when you visit the page manually.
MFA mobile apps, not just sites
If you're only removing MFA sites from your buys, be sure to look out for MFA apps too. Those are "made for ad fraud mobile crapps," which could be eating up 60 - 90% of the impressions in your media buys. Yeah; MFA crapps eat up more impressions than MFA sites. If you use FouAnalytics in-ad tags to measure your campaigns, you can quickly tell what percentage of your impressions are going to mobile apps. In the FouAnalytics dashboard, look for the data grid called "mobile_app_name." The percentage just to the right of that tells you what percentage of the ad impressions were served in mobile apps. Look at the following table of hilarious crapp names. Yeah, these crapps ate up your impressions, and your ads were never shown to humans because all of these craps don't exist. Don't believe me? Just try to look up any of these names on the Google Play app store. You won't find any of them.
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How FouAnalytics detects MFA sites and apps
In the FouAnalytics dashboard, if you type the following:
page-frame-list
page-ad-count
page-above-fold-ad-count
Type any or all of these in the search box and click Filter. This will show the following data grids so you can see how many iframes on the page, how many of those were ad iframes, and how many of those ads were "above the fold." How many ads do you think are appropriate on a single page? What about infinite scroll pages? Does 150 - 164 iframes or ads sound ok to you?
If you are already using FouAnalytics in-ad tags to measure your ad impressions, PageXray links are built into the Domain App report. Each site is hyperlinked. If you click on it, it will open a PageXray. This way you don't have to manually visit the site and risk exposing your own browser to potential malware. The PageXray also gives you the information above, so you can determine if you want to buy ads from those sites any more. If you decide to block the site, just check the checkbox, and a list of sites and apps will be compiled for you at the top of the Domain App report page, so you can copy and paste into your block list.
See more details here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/beyond-mfa-new-details-fouanalytics-viewer-discretion-fou
Other examples and PageXray screen shots observed over the years.