Best Aspects of Programmatic Mobile Advertising

Every day, more people are using mobile devices for consumer purposes. Programmatic mobile advertising is a method advertisers can use to best target these consumers. It utilizes sophisticated consumer tracking systems to ensure that consumers are seeing the right ads in the right places. To sum it up, the ad decisions are determined by data-fueled, automated computers to ensure that they are specific to the consumer viewing them. Knowing how this type of advertising might benefit advertisers and understanding the best aspects of this advertising method helps ad professionals to make the best decisions as to how to advertise to garner the best results for their efforts.

 

Whitelisting Anno 2017

There is a mobile website or application for just about every profession and interest imaginable. This creates a number of opportunities for advertisers, but not many have taken advantage of this yet. A Demand Side Platform (DSP) has the potential to put ads on approximately 200,000 individual mobile sites and apps. The range is very diverse, and it includes both mostly unknown applications and those that are rather popular. No matter a person’s profession or interests, it is not hard to find an app for it. This means that when it comes to specific products, whitelists are something advertisers can use. Whitelisting is a type of programmatic mobile advertising that is considerably practical and flexible.

 

Simultaneous Effort Between Wi-Fi Hotspot, Device IDs and Beacons

Advertisers utilizing a versatile DSP, both the managed service type and the self-serve option, make it possible to serve ads and upload device IDs on relevant devices. A device ID is a type of digital signature that is unique to the specific device. Wi-Fi hotspots and beacons have the potential to both observe and save them. This allows for devices to essentially collect information and provide ads that encourage consumers to take action. This type of programmatic mobile advertising is essentially based on gathered intelligence associated with a specific place, such as a college or a hospital.

 

Ensure Very Specific Locations for Advertisements to Reach the Intended Audience

This type of programmatic mobile advertising makes it possible to involve a wide array of mobile websites and applications in a specific ad campaign. This helps an advertiser to supply ads to a specific audience. For example, advertisers targeting nurses can use the right DSP to upload a large amount of nursing-related company addresses. Then, when a consumer goes to a website or application served by this DSP in a certain location, the ads are served to this consumer. This makes it possible to use an extremely local approach to reach thousands of different mobile websites and applications.

 

Consider Programmatic Mobile Advertising for your Company

As you can see, there are a number of things to consider to ensure effective and efficient programmatic mobile advertising. Having a strong understanding of the best aspects helps ad professionals to ensure that their ads are properly placed and that consumers are seeing the ads that might interest them the most. Since this is an automated process, it might also save advertisers some time since systems are making the decisions instead of people.

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How $7 Million was Wasted in Ad Fraud Operation Dubbed “The Traffic Alchemist”

As a provider of anti-fraud solutions, Protected Media unveiled a fraud operation they have dubbed “The Traffic Alchemist,” with company representatives pointing to fraud artists who have been disguising junk traffic as views on reputable sites – all of which have boasted high Alexa ratings via from Twitter and Google. The catalyst city for the scam was New York and began in April 2016, managing to evade detection because it involved actual users rather than bots, masqueraded traffic and blanketed fraudulent online portals so they’d be off the radar of scientists.

The real barn burner of the whole situation is this: The wool-over-eyes scam burned through some seven million eye-watering dollars per month at its peak – and is still continuing, albeit at a reduced rate.

How Fraud Advertising May Not be that Unusual

According to Asaf Greiner, CEO of Protected Media, this Traffic Alchemist scam, as it came to be known, isn’t unusual – not due to one single technique’s sophistication, but because it combined several methods together in order to keep the ad fraud activity under the radar. Here’s a good analogy of what is being suggested here: Remember the scene in Office Space when Jennifer Aniston’s character inquires of Ron Livingston’s character what he’s trying to do with the pennies “stolen” from the company he works for, and how he likens his plot to taking pennies from the disabled children’s jars in stores? The essence was that “Peter’s” company wouldn’t catch on to the fraud because so little was being taken at a time. This isn’t the exact same thing that was occurring in the Alchemist scam, but the concept is similar – keeping the fraudulent activity off or under the radar.

Greiner also feels that by looking past the technology and revealing the algorithms that manipulate traffic attributes, it is indeed possible to detect similar complex ad schemes that are always in place…but with “slightly different variations.”

Beware of Junk Traffic

Protected Media analyzed the entire situation and came to the conclusion that the fraud began by purchasing junk traffic, usually found on adult/porn or torrent sites, and which is infamous for extended viewing times. From there, expanded/longer sessions were divided into hundreds of short sessions on “legitimate, lucrative” sites operated by the source of the fraud; these sites ended up being shielded to seem reputable as to attract direct traffic, but in actuality were inundated with pop-up ads that couldn’t be viewed. Up to 35 ads were reportedly served per user in the operation and which were refreshed every 15 seconds, ultimately yielding 140 ad impressions per minute. As the phony websites were clustered together into groups of seven to 10, each site cycled traffic through it to keep “realistic measurements” so anti-fraud software wouldn’t be issued a warning. Clever, indeed.

Touching again on what was mentioned earlier, the path to these pop-under sites was cloaked so that the viewers appeared to be arriving “organically” from Google or Twitter and from legit search and social activity as opposed to views on torrent and pornography-oriented sites. The “decontaminated” traffic was shared via Google Analytics and subsequently reported by legitimate third-party platforms, ensuring advertisers were confident the traffic was reputable.

At the conclusion of several weeks, when the activity was deemed no longer “good enough” to keep the sites on target publisher lists, the websites were abandoned for a fresh cluster; thus, the scam relentlessly continued on month after month.

Protected Media’s presence in this investigation was timely and crucial, as the company’s solutions ensure those who are buying and selling digital advertising that mobile and video ads are legitimately grounded, visible and seen by actual people.

Infographic by Video Ad News

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Helping brand marketers measure the impact of their advertising

What is the impact of my marketing efforts? Brands have been asking this question for years. However, even with the precision of digital, the challenge remains. A recent eMarketer report states viewability, attribution and measurement are still digital advertisers’ biggest concerns. We are committed as a company to enhancing our measurement solutions, an area in which our MoPub team has already built a strong foundation over the past year. Today, we’re taking our commitment a step further and are excited to announce multiple new relationships with industry-leading third-party measurement providers that enable marketers to measure the reach of their video ad campaigns.

We’ve invested heavily to provide brand marketers with the ability to measure their impact along three axes:

Our global relationships with Moat (@moat) and Integral Ad Science (@integralads) will enable marketers to understand if the video ads they run on Twitter are viewable by humans and compare video ad viewability and attention metrics across channels. Among the video impressions Moat has measured on Twitter, Moat has detected that over 99% of them are viewed by humans.

We are also announcing we’ll be expanding our relationships with Nielsen (@Nielsen) and comScore (@comScore). Using Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings and comScore validated Campaign Essentials (vCE), we will allow marketers to measure whether their Twitter ads were delivered to the audience they intended to reach.

We have relationships with the top measurement companies in the world, which allows our partners to measure the reach, influence, and action that results from their advertising. This includes ongoing conversations with organizations like the Media Ratings Council on the accreditation process.

Read the full article here: https://blog.twitter.com/2017/helping-brand-marketers-measure-the-impact-of-their-advertising