Advertising companies and marketing agencies follow ad verification to ensure that their advertising funds are well spent, using ad verification proxies as an anti-fraud approach. How exactly? Let’s dive in and find out.

Digital advertising has become a trending method by companies to advertise their products, as the internet influences people’s lives more and more globally, and the number of ads online is increasing daily. Hence, advertisers invest a large sum of money in online advertisements. Before investing in digital ads, most businesses tend to research advertising platforms to learn more about their internet traffic and visitors. But the question is, “What is the quality of the ad?”

The research alone doesn’t help to achieve business goals. The digital marketing industry is fully automated, leading to a large-scale problem known as ad fraud. This means that businesses can be lured into ad fraud traps unknowingly where all the advertising funds invested are washed up, and ads will never reach the desired audience.

That’s where ad verification services come into play.

Ad verification practices are followed by businesses attentive to technological changes to tackle these accelerating scales of ad fraud. To ensure that the advertising funds are well protected, using an ad verification proxy is the best approach. The best ad verification companies also use residential proxies to capture the ad fraudsters to ensure brand safety anonymously.

It is essential to have ad verification for online advertising companies, as it ensures that ads reach the target audience and protect the funds and a brand-safe environment.

This article aims to discuss how ad fraud works and how using residential proxies for ad verification can protect your brand and marketing spend.

What is Ad Fraud?

Advertising fraud refers to any attempt used to defraud online advertising networks for financial benefits. It can be referred to as simulated traffic using clicks, impressions, data events, or conversions with fake accounts or bots.

Scammers use several methods to trick ad networks and advertisers into paying them. The new strategy of ad fraud at present is tricking advertisers into fraudulent websites by ad impressions. Ad fraudsters run sites faking heaving traffic to attract more ads to their servers. Very often, this is achieved using bots, meaning ads may never reach the targeted audience.

 

Common Techniques Used by Ad Fraudsters


Impression Fraud

It shows the ad “technically” but never meets the human eye. The ads can be reduced to a pixel’s size, hidden, shown behind the main page, or not displayed as expected. This type of fraud involves targeting the ad networks where payments are based on impressions (views) and not clicks.

Ad Click Fraud

A technique that mostly damages the advertisers. This involves ad bots and scripts to automate the ad clicks.

Botnet Ad Fraud

Botnets are used to generate a fake number of visits to a website that displays ads or fake the number of clicks on an ad. This way, the website’s ad space becomes more expensive.

This is just scratching the surface of how online advertisers are being scammed nowadays.
These methods are always modified into more advanced and smarter versions, which results in draining the advertising funds for online advertisers.

More about fraudsters’ techniques can be found in this great article.

Ad verification comes into play as a remedy and precaution for this problematic fraudulent. Residential proxies are used along with many of the ad verification techniques to detect and migrate ad fraudsters.

What is Ad Verification?

Ad verification is a process to ensure that the ads meet a set of criteria. These criteria include that the ads are displayed on intended websites with the right context and are viewed by the desired audience.

How does Ad Verification Works?

Advertisers use ad verification to ensure that the designated attributes of the ad meet the defined terms that are pointed out in the ad campaign settings. These can include parameters such as the context, the geographical location, or the website. This is done through verification tags deployed within the ad markup to analyze the publisher’s content and make sure that the site fits the intended ad.

The advertiser receives a report from the ad verification vendor, which allows them to analyze the performance and the placement of the advertisement.

Even though advertisers typically use ad verification, it benefits the publishers too. It helps advertisers to improve the efficiency of their ad campaigns while saving their valuable advertising funds. With perspective to publishers, ad verification helps them reduce the risk of running fraudulent advertisements on their sites and better control the ads displayed on their websites.

Even the best ad verification vendors use residential IP proxies to ensure that your ads are placed on appropriate and reliable websites.

How Residential Proxies Help Ad Verification Services? 

Residential proxies, when used for ad verification practices, are also known as ad proxies. They help detect fraud, improve ad performance, and anonymously check the ad placement on advertisers’ landing pages. In simple terms, residential proxies are used for reputation management and ad verification. It allows you to verify ads posted on different websites and delete any suspicious ads you didn’t create. As residential proxies offer IPs that belong to real residential addresses, it’s quite impossible to ban them.

One critical issue that ad verification vendors face today is IP blocking by ad fraudsters. This is where residential proxies come into play to save the day. They provide organic, unique, and independent Geo-located IP addresses. Therefore, detecting the traffic that verifies an ad by ad fraudsters is out of the question.

A better solution for Ad Verification practices

NetNut is the only residential proxy network to offer one-hop connectivity to worldwide ISPs, ensuring a faster proxy speed, 24/7 IP availability, and in-house IP rotation to meet your ad verification needs.

Verify ads at ease & migrate fraudsters using NetNut Chrome extension, with static/rotation IP sessions and specific countries selection.

Using Proxies for Ad Verification
Senior Growth Marketing Manager
As NetNut's Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Or Maman applies his marketing proficiency and analytical insights to propel growth, establishing himself as a force within the proxy industry.