As fraudsters swarm like so many bees at the display advertising picnic, the industry is trying to blunt their stings with a combination of automated and manual solutions.
Google has been among the most proactive ad platform players, hiring legions of real humans to review websites submitted to DoubleClick Ad Exchange. It recently acquired Spider.io, a UK-based firm specializing in detecting bots and other forms of digital ad fraud, and more recently integrated Spider.io’s technology with its demand-side platform.
In a blog post published Tuesday, Google product manager Payam Shodjai said Google has started proactively blocking ads it deems fraudulent from auctions within DoubleClick Bid Manager. The fraud types include toolbar-injected ads and ads hidden within iframes. Advertisers don’t need to turn the feature on, as Google is automatically culling these impressions before they are bid on – resulting in a 2.6% reduction in total inventory exposed to demand.
However, the percentage of that inventory varies widely by exchange provider, Shodjai noted. The below chart shows the fraud rates detected across 16 exchanges, with rates ranging from less than 1% up to about 18%.
Baking Spider.io and Google’s internally developed anti-fraud tech into DBM is a key step for the company in that it extends fraud blocking beyond Google’s own supply, where the manual filtration has been effective at screening shady publishers, to outside inventory pools.
But Google still has work to do. For instance, the lucrative video ad sector has drawn major interest and investment from ad scoundrels, but the company has yet to roll out a pre-bid detection solution to block their efforts.
Payam Shodjai said in response to an inquiry from AdExchanger, “This problem is most prevalent in display inventory, so we’ve rolled out our solution for that first and will look to broaden it down the road.”
