The two biggest dangers for digital campaigns

DIGITAL Advertising in the digital universe brings opportunities, but also harbors risks. Philipp Semmler from Mediaschneider describes the biggest risks for advertising clients and outlines measures. The topic of brand safety and ad fraud in all its facets is nothing new. Click, cookie and traffic fraud as well as inappropriate environments have existed since the advent of digital advertising. With the growth of the industry and the significant budget shifts into digital media, the topics of ad fraud, brand safety and the visibility of digital campaigns are moving into the focus of advertising clients, agencies and technology service providers worldwide.Brand safety - unsuitable environmentsNot all advertising environments fit a brand's image. Sometimes just a few adverts in the wrong context are enough to damage a brand, and the definition and interpretation of unsuitable environments depends on the individual specifications and requirements of the customer. Is a moving image advertisement, for example before video contributions on news platforms about conflicts, politics or disasters, still safe enough for your brand? Internationally, only around 2.8 % of all traffic delivered on AdExchanges and around 1.9 % of directly booked inventory fall into the high-risk category. Depending on the source, values of less than 1% are cited. Unfortunately, there are no valid figures for Switzerland.

Advertisers should therefore focus more on the following two risks, which have a significant negative impact on digital campaigns.1. viewability - the basis of effective advertisingThe billing of digital campaigns is (still) based globally on "delivered" impressions (ad impressions) - and not on "visible" impressions. This means that a lot of traffic is generated and billed on non-visible positions. The benchmark, measured across all advertising media formats according to the IAB standard, for viewable impressions is around 53 % for premium publishers and around 42 % on networks and ad exchanges. With the right measures and negotiating skills, 30 to 40 % more visible ad impressions are possible. A "viewable" ad impression is an ad impression of at least one second in which at least 50 % of the ad is visible.2. ad fraud - evil machinesAd fraud is the practice of delivering advertising that has no potential to be seen by human users and is generated by bots, i.e. machines.The industry owes the existence of ad fraud primarily to fundamentally misaligned incentives in the online advertising market.Firstly, it is very easy for bots to generate both impressions and clicks without the presence of a human. Not even the focus on CPA (cost per action) targets on the website represents a serious hurdle for bots and can be manipulated. The suspicion arises that with the increasing complexity in the market, price pressure, false promises and the fragmentation of value creation, ethics can fall by the wayside.secondly: Ad fraud can be found on every ad-financed website and affects every advertiser. Buying traffic is an industry-wide accepted means for websites with marketing pressure, because publishers see themselves forced to increase traffic on the site to be marketed in view of eroding prices in order to improve the monetization of the content and consolidate their market position.third: Even publishers who actively defend themselves against fraudulent traffic are vulnerable. This is because many bots visit premium websites to collect cookies and profiles, which are then offered on networks, thereby driving up website traffic.The proportion of fraud traffic in the markets varies greatly and is probably significantly higher in the USA than in Europe. According to the "Integral AdScience Media Quality Report Q1", the proportion in Germany is around 11%. Other market participants speak of significantly lower or even significantly higher shares in some cases.Measures for fire safetyAt the top of the list is good partner management. Not the selective exclusion of individual providers, but the selective use of reputable partners improves brand safety with regard to unsuitable environments and reduces the proportion of ad fraud. However, even reputable partners can inadvertently carry unsuitable traffic in their portfolio. For this reason, all providers must be continuously monitored and suspicious actions must be reported immediately.code-based solutions (TAG) can be used to check ad impressions before (pre-bid) and after (post-bid) insertion for certain types of ad fraud and brand safety. The use of crawlers, i.e. "good" bots that simulate human users, helps to identify the proportion of ad fraud that cannot be detected using TAG-based solutions. Crawlers are very efficient at recognizing pop-ups, pop-unders, iFrames, URL masking and refferer fakes, and viewability measurements are used to further increase the quality of traffic. These are now part of the standard equipment of every ad server. Specialized third-party providers can also validate this data. However, recent cases show that Even viewability measurements are not immune to manipulation, but probably the most important point is a realistic assessment of the cost structure of digital advertising - as well as the specification of achievable campaign goals. Advertisers should not expect illusory campaign results and pricing from their partners. They will always find someone who offers them impressions, clicks, website traffic, likes, shares or views at unbeatable prices. But what sounds too good to be true usually is. Quality has its price, even in the digital advertising market!Author: Philipp Semmler, Mediaschneider AG