The online ad industry is in the grips of a fraud crisis. Recent reports indicate that as much as $1 out of every $3 spent on online advertising goes toward fraud – nearly $18.5 billion. That’s an alarming rate, surely, and it has the industry searching for answers and assurances that fraud can be brought under control.
That said, this shouldn’t sway SMBs away from advertising online. The Internet remains a great engagement medium and it is where they’re going to find new customers. While fraud can be a thorny issue, the companies that offer SMB advertising services are already doing a lot to weed out the associated waste and provide only the best inventory.
AffinityX has assembled a stack of best-in-class technology partners to combat fraud. The companies deploying AffinityX’s solutions and products can confidently tell their SMB customers that they have the means to fight fraud and run high-performing campaigns with confidence.
There are a few important facts about fraud worth noting as well. Fraud generally rears its head when advertisers invest heavily in scale campaigns on the national level. This surely impacts SMB advertisers, but not all of them. Regional and local campaigns are less susceptible to fraud. This is especially true for mobile inventory, which uses hyper-local geo-targeting to identify consumer targets who are near a business at the time. That kind of inventory is very difficult for fraudsters to fake.
AffinityX will continue to make fraud a priority, evaluating programmatic buying platforms and targeting technologies to identify those that do the best job filtering out fraudulent ad opportunities. We are in the process of directly implementing fraud detection technology to eliminate any concerns from advertising providers and help large scale campaigns deliver the most impact for SMB advertisers. So while fraud may remain a topic of industry conversation in the months to come, AffinityX is doing everything it can to assure its clients are delivering high-quality campaigns to their SMB advertisers.
