Why 60% of digital ad spending going to mobile apps is a bad thing

Are a large portion of your ads running in mobile apps? Are they viewable? Are your video ads audible? Are they running in mobile apps that humans know about and use daily? Try to name 10 mobile apps that you use every day. Can you get to 10? Most folks slow down by 7 - 8 and can't name 10 mobile apps they use every day. And a lot of time is spent in YouTube, Instagram, and messaging apps. So there aren't a lot of humans using alarm block apps, flashlight apps, all day long to generate 30 trillion bid requests per week. Have a look at some more evidence below and you decide whether investing a lot of ad dollars in mobile apps is going to generate a return for you.

"Confidential sellers" (feature) masks the bad sites and apps where your ads actually went

In Google's platform, there's a feature called "confidential sellers." This was originally created to help mainstream publishers remain hidden while selling their remnant inventory for cheap CPM prices. But this "feature" has been massively abused by bad guys to hide their fake sites and apps from view. In the table below, the url on the left is what you see in your placement reports from Google's platform. The source on the right is the corresponding app name that is unmasked by FouAnalytics so you can see where your ads actually went. Have a look through and see if you recognize any of these apps and if you think your ads should be running on them (if no other humans even know they exist).

MFA apps

Large advertisers have been caught up buying lists of MFA sites to block. But there are vastly more mobile apps that are created solely to make ad revenue fraudulently. Most humans have never heard of them before, so there's NOT a whole bunch of humans that use these apps continuously to generate the 100s of billions of impressions purchased by advertisers every month. Why are these crapps useless for advertisers? Note the window size of 0x0. That's called pixel stuffing, and humans obviously can't see the ad that is 0x0 pixels in dimension. That's also why viewability is 10% overall (for the whole campaign that has a ton of these crapps chomping on ad impressions). Even if the ad size is correct, like 320x50, 300x250, 728x90, etc. the ad may still not be viewable. The 70.1% of ads in the 0x0 window are what contribute to the 89.2% marked as viewable:0 in FouAnalytics.

In addition to the crapps listed above, check the list below of hilarious mobile app names we observed in large campaigns. The bad guys are literally laughing at the ad buyers, because the legacy fraud verification vendors failed to catch any of these with their prebid filters. These campaigns are still not using inclusion lists, because they think they are protected by the legacy vendors' prebid filters. Obviously, they weren't protected.

We detect these apps with FouAnalytics, track back to which supply source they came from and cut off those suppliers. FouAnalytics is analytics and doesn't do any blocking. But DSPs, SSPs, and advertisers are using FouAnalytics as a feedback loop to see which bad guys are still eating up their impressions so they can then make the appropriate adjustments to not bid on them going forward. Advertisers can block the site and app name, or they can block the publisher ID or seller ID; and in some cases they can turn off entire supply sources where most of the fraud is coming into the system.

If you STILL don't believe me that you are getting ENTIRELY ripped off by these mobile apps, riddle me this. How do humans use those apps or play those mobile games without touching the screen or clicking anything? See the click and touch charts below. They are literally blank. No clicks. No touch events on ALL of these mobile apps. Hint, because they are all fraudulent MFA apps that no humans know about or use. And they can still load billions of ad impressions and get away with it. Advertisers that don't have FouAnalytics to measure their ads are the easiest targets.

So what?

Legacy fraud verification failed to catch ALL of the above. None of the prebid filtering worked. When you have postbid javascript, like a FouAnalytics in-ad tag, you can detect these and figure out where they came from. Not only can you block these bad apps, you can cut off the entire supply source or publisher/sellerIDs from which they came. That's how you make your campaigns better.

Follow/subscribe for more case examples and screenshots: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/augustinefou/recent-activity/newsletter/