Digital marketing is at an all-time high as more and more advertisers are spending a massive sum of money on digital ads. If a recent study is to be believed, digital ad spending will account for 50.1% of the total media ad spending this year. This makes it easy to conclude that the internet marketing industry is growing at a rapid rate.
However, things are not as simple as they seem to be. While internet marketing puts your ads on a range of websites just within a matter of seconds, many of them end up on fraudulent websites. This means that your ads are never shown to your target audience. The practice of programmed advertising ends up hurting the budget of the company with no outputs in return.
According to a report by eMarketer, $5.8 billion will be lost globally this year. This is enough to gauge how prevalent this practice is.
Although ad fraud affects the performance of your ad drastically, there are various other parameters like ad placement and context, which tend to hurt its performance. This is where the ad verification has emerged to be a partial remedy for these problems.
Here are a few ways in which ad fraudsters influence online advertisements:
- Ad stacking
In an attempt to make more money, ad fraudsters position several ads one over the other. This makes the advertisers think that their ad is published and is visible, but in reality, only the top ad is actually viewable.
This is a trick to wrong the advertisers as the advertiser thinks that they are getting the required impressions. However, in reality, target audiences never got to see the ad.
- Ad click fraud
If advertisers have signed on a pay per click model, ad fraudsters are quick to recognize and make misuse of this technique. They end up getting ad clicks via ad bots and scripts, thus corrupting your insights.
- Pixel stuffing
Here, they place ads into a single pixel frame such that the final advertisement becomes un-viewable for a human eye.
What is Ad Verification?
Ad verification is a process of cross-checking by advertisers wherein they ensure that their ads are displayed in the correct context on the intended website in the right position and are seen by the right eye. If you crave more knowledge on ad verification and how to solve the issue of fraudulent ads, visit Oxylabs website. They share their in-depth knowledge on solutions for this very expensive issue businesses have to deal with.
To achieve this, verification tags and other parameters are added to the ad to ensure that the ads are posted on the intended publisher’s page.
It is essential to mention here that it is not only the position and context of the ad that will impact its performance, but it will also affect the brand’s image. If an advertisement is displayed next to an inappropriate ad with hate speech or vulgar content, the users might end up associating the brand with the content and may get a wrong impression.
How Proxies Help in Ad Verification?
Residential proxies, also used as ad proxies, are the proxies provided by an internet service provider. These help the advertisers in detecting frauds and optimizing the ad performance.
Although ad verification scripts are deployed in all major websites, ad fraudsters tend to fight back with them by blocking the IP addresses altogether. This is when residential proxies work in your favor by providing you with unique and diverse geo-located IP addresses. The use of proxies while verifying the ads makes it difficult for the scammers and fraudsters to detect the traffic that is verifying the ad. This way, they are unable to block such traffic and help you in discovering the wrong.
The Wrap Up
Keeping the various malpractices involved in the digital advertising industry in mind, it has become imperative for businesses to verify their ads. Ad verification ensures that the ads are displayed and served on the intended website and are reaching the right set of eyes.
Ad verification ensures that you don’t end up paying more and also cross-checks that the reach and impressions that your ads are getting are the real figures and not the ones generated by bots and scripts.
In this context, it becomes crucial to use a proxy to prevent your IP from getting blocked by ad fraudsters. After all, if you are keeping a check on ad fraudsters for more than a day, you are likely to come upon their radar. This is why using a residential proxy network with a pool of IP addresses that can be rotated proves to be the ideal solution.