Digital Media News | Bot Traffic (2)

Feb 6, 2015 8:00:00 AM

Watch Out: How Click Fraud Is Taking Over And What To Do About It Part 1

If you've been affected by click fraud, how should you deal with it? Marketing analytics can help. Have you ever visited a social media site, seen a not-so-interesting story with thousands of likes, and clicked on it, mainly because others were clicking? If you answered yes, you may have been duped by click fraud - and you are not alone.

The Wall Street Journal last year reported that 36 percent of Web traffic is spawned by click fraud programs and bots, and the cost to the global digital display advertising industry was approximately $11.6 billion in 2014.

The statistics are shocking, but don’t fret - this blog will show you what to watch out for and how to deal with click fraud, when traversing cyberspace.

Jan 5, 2015 7:30:00 AM

Bot Fraud Accounts For $6 Billion Loss In Digital Advertising

According toresearch conducted by digital security firm White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), nearly a quarter of video ad impressions are triggered by "bots;" (automated entities that mimic the behavior of humans by clicking on ads and watching videos) and11% of display ads are viewed by fake consumers, created by cybercriminals with the purpose of taking a slice of the billions of dollars spent on digital advertising each year.

The White Ops/ANA study is one of the most comprehensive on the subject of online fraud in digital advertising. It analyzed 181 campaigns from 36 ANA member companies, over a two-month period earlier this year.Ad budgets ranged from $10 million to more than $1 billion and brands ranged across nine vertical categories. Tagged to identify bot fraud, the ads accounted for 5.5 billion impressions in 3 million domains.

The findings

The study found that while some bot fraud was triggered by fake websites, the majority of it(67%) came from bot nets taking over unsuspecting users’ home computers. As users logged into services such as Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, the bots infiltrated their systems and mimickedthe user’s behavior; sophisticated bots were able to move the mouse and move the cursor over ads;they also put items in shopping carts and visited websites to generate cookies, in order to appear more demographically appealing to advertisers and publishers.

Dec 19, 2013 6:47:00 AM

Pixalate Cracking Down On Click Fraud, Bot Traffic and Ad Viewability

I recently spoke with Jalal Nasir, CEO of Pixalate, a leading real-time ad analytics platform that helps advertisers and ad networks detect fraud and get performance data to improve their digital marketing campaigns and optimize media spend.

Jun 27, 2012 10:47:00 AM

Forget Do Not Track, I Want Targeted Ads and So Do You – ClickZ

“Do Not Track” supporters listen up. I’ll admit it, I can be a bit self-centered sometimes, but I’m going go out on a limb here and suggest that so are most people. I’m not the first person to say it and I won’t be the last: people are very into themselves. We like to think that the world revolves around us. Perhaps it’s a biological thing? Maybe a feature that sets us apart from other organisms on the planet? Whatever it is, this idea of us being into ourselves shouldn’t be ignored, especially when discussing online advertising and the highly debatable topic of “Do Not Track”.