Adfraud share is only 2.2 percent of advertising contacts in Germany
The proportion of potentially fraudulent online advertising contacts in the German market is at a very low level: only an average of 2.2 percent of advertising contacts fall into the "adfraud" category, where fraudulent intentions must be assumed when the advertising is played out.
The average viewability rate for online advertising as a whole is 61.1 percent. This is the result of a recent survey by the Digital Marketing Quality (DMQ) focus group in the German Digital Industry Association (BVDW), in which leading ad verification providers participated.
Online advertising in Germany is living up to its good reputation: The picture is positive in terms of both fraudulently generated advertising contacts and visibility. To determine the rates, the Digital Marketing Quality (DMQ) focus group in the BVDW aggregated and evaluated data from five measurement service providers (batchmedia, comScore, Integral Ad Science, Meetrics, Moat). According to this, only 2.2 percent of advertising contacts are generated by fraudulent bots or non-valid ad deliveries. Andreas Hamdorf from the chair of the Digital Marketing Quality focus group explains why this machine traffic does not necessarily have to be fraudulent: "We have to distinguish between legitimate and known crawlers for market observation and page indexing on the one hand and fraudulent bots on the other. We have to filter out both from the advertising media contacts as best we can - as the current investigation shows, we are succeeding very well. Nevertheless, these fraudulent advertising contacts, i.e. adfraud, must be combated." Current systems now identify the known bots quite well, so they can be factored out of the ad server systems' reporting and customers don't have to pay for them, Hamdorf said. "There is no economic damage as a result."
Good visibility scores in international comparison
At the same time as the rate for machine-triggered ad media contacts, the Digital Marketing Quality focus group also publishes the viewability rate in its quality report, which is based on the IAB Standard 50/1. This standard states that visibility is given when at least 50 percent of the ad has been displayed in the visible area of the browser for at least one second. Here, the average viewability is 61.1 percent. "Particularly in view of other markets where we see much lower figures, this value shows that the German market is addressing the issue of viewabilty," explains Philipp von Hilgers (Meetrics) also in the chair of the BVDW's DMQ focus group and head of the Viewability Lab. "However, significantly better values are still possible with well-implemented campaigns." But 100 percent viewability is not possible due to a wide variety of influencing factors, some of which are technically uncontrollable, von Hilgers said. "However, clear standards in the market and unrelenting innovations for simpler optimization and control of campaigns will help to get ever closer to the ideal value of one hundred percent visibility."
Market intelligence through standards
With the quality report now published, including rates for visibility and machine traffic, the Digital Marketing Quality focus group has implemented an important project following its founding last year. Björn Kaspring (InteractiveMedia CCSP), chairman of the DMQ focus group, explains: "The term quality is sometimes very broad. With this focus group, we will do important educational work as well as establish market-valid benchmarks and standards so that quality can be better evaluated and compared."
