Ad fraudsters are often painted as criminal masterminds – but, fact is, they really aren’t.
Bad actors don’t have to devise new ways to swindle advertisers because the same old schemes that worked 15 years ago, like click spamming and clickjacking, still work today.
“Gullible marketers keep falling for the same tactics over and over again,” said Andreas Naumann, who joined mobile measurement platform AppsFlyer last month as its “anti-fraud evangelist” after nearly seven years in a similar fraud-fighting role at AppsFlyer competitor Adjust.
One reason fraudsters can rest on their laurels is due to misaligned incentives across the supply chain, which is not a new problem.
Growth marketers are often given unrealistic acquisition goals and know if they don’t use their entire budget, they might get less money the following year. So they end up spending on less-than-kosher channels. At the same time, some attribution providers charge for their services per install.
Neither party is motivated to look too closely at what’s happening in the background.
But there’s another less obvious explanation for why ad fraud has fallen off the radar for many marketers: SKAdNetwork.
The knowledge gap
When Apple first launched SKAdNetwork in 2020 as its solution for measuring app installs without relying on the IDFA, developers and their partners diverted most of their resources toward figuring out how the heck to use the technology.
SKAdNetwork is the only Apple-blessed method to attribute installs for iOS users that haven’t given developers permission to use their device ID for ad tracking and targeting.
“All of a sudden, everyone was so focused on understanding SKAdNetwork and staying afloat,” Naumann said. “Optimizing against fraud became less of a priority.”
Another confounding factor is that a lot of user acquisition jobs are entry-level, so it’s hard to instill consistency. UA specialists spend between one and three years in their roles and then rotate out, either to another developer or because they’ve been promoted.
“Because people move out of those positions pretty quickly, the knowledge doesn’t get shared,” Naumann said. “Whoever comes in next has to learn how to solve the same problems all over again.”
Meanwhile, marketers are dealing with budget decreases thanks to the shaky economy. They’re back to buying cheap (often fraudulent) traffic, and in their quest to make money, ad networks aren’t being as careful about the publishers they work with.
Get smart
And so the fight against mobile ad fraud continues.
As AppsFlyer’s anti-fraud evangelist, it’s Naumann’s job to educate clients and the industry in general on the threat of ad fraud and on potential solutions. He’s also helping develop Protect360, which is AppsFlyer’s machine-learning-based suite of fraud detection and prevention tools.
But AppsFlyer’s team of roughly 80 anti-fraud specialists don’t report to Naumann directly. Rather, he’ll act almost like a full-time internal anti-fraud consultant who digs into AppsFlyer’s data to conduct fraud research, help guide fraud-related product development and generate business insights for the data science folks.
Edifying the industry is the top priority right now, though.
“I did a lot of education sessions with clients in the past when I was with Adjust, and now I’m going back to those same companies, and none of the people I previously trained work there anymore,” Naumann said. “That knowledge is lost.”
In his spare time, Naumann is also working on a project called the Coalition Against Ad Fraud (CAAF), an industry group made up of attribution vendors and ad networks that aims to develop global standards to address ad fraud.
To fight fraud at its roots, the market needs to collaborate.
Splashy headlines about uncovering a botnet or a fraudster getting arrested by the FBI for money laundering are “nice to see,” Naumann said, but “those things are a drop in the bucket.”
“You might see the amount of ad fraud globally go down by half a percent … and then just a couple of days later, other people have already jumped in to fill the gap,” he said. “That’s why, long term, the only way to solve this is to create a safe and transparent environment for people to operate in.”
