Without ad verification, the world of digital advertising would probably resemble a jungle – a place full of predators, unknown insects, and poisonous plants (but instead, with ads that harm brands’ reputations, disrupt UX, etc.). With no guardrails or checks, both publishers and advertisers risk wasting money and even more! Luckily, this article provides all the information you need to know in the subject of ad verification.
What is ad verification
Ad verification revolves around identifying harmful issues, such as fake traffic, fraudulent clicks, unsuitable ad placements, and malware advertising, which can be considered a cyberattack technique. It acts as a security check within the digital advertising industry, pinpointing potential problems that could damage a brand’s reputation, have a bad impact on the User Experience, and also affect ad revenue.
How ad verification protects advertisers and publishers
Ad verification is correlated with several key factors in digital advertising, including safety, earnings, and performance metrics. It helps to ensure that both advertisers and publishers can benefit from the transparent and trustworthy ad ecosystem. Here are the details:
How ad verification protects advertisers:
- When it comes to advertisers, ad verification helps them ensure that their ads are displayed properly and in the right context, thereby protecting their reputation. In fact, protecting reputation is a core purpose of brand safety, which ensures that ads do not appear alongside inappropriate, offensive, or misleading content;
- At the beginning of digital advertising history, there were no automatic systems, so advertisers had to make deals one-on-one with website owners. Right now, the situation looks completely different, with most of the industry utilizing an automatic way of buying and selling ad inventory, so it’s nearly impossible to track every website that displays an advertiser’s ads. That’s where ad verification comes in handy;
- Ad verification helps detect fake impressions, which make advertisers lose billions of dollars annually. Bots and click farms are a real threat that cause advertisers to pay for an ad impression that is not visible to a real user;
- What’s more, ad verification tools help advertisers understand how well their ads are performing, so they not only guarantee peace of mind, but also indicate what can be improved in the future.
How ad verification protects publishers:
- When it comes to publishers, displaying malicious, inappropriate, or poorly matched ads can have a really destructive impact on User Experience, brand trust, and long-term audience loyalty. Even a single lousy ad can damage a site’s credibility or drive visitors away. Ad verification helps publishers maintain high-quality ad environments by blocking harmful or low-quality creatives before they appear;
- Additionally, ad verification helps to maintain healthy and strong publisher-advertiser relationships. By identifying potential problems like fake activity or harmful content, ad verification prevents advertisers from losing money and protects publishers from unfair accusations.
How does ad verification work
During an ad verification process, a small code snippet called a “verification tag” or “beacon” is loaded along with the ad, helping to track the ad’s location, monitor who sees it, and ensure that it meets the advertiser’s targeting criteria, such as audience demographics and website context. After that, data is collected, and a company that performs ad verification sends the needed information through a report or dashboard.
Ad verification is usually done by independent companies that are not affiliated with either advertisers or publishers. Such companies leverage adaptive machine learning models, APIs, and algorithms to perform all the necessary tasks.
The foundations of effective ad verification
There are several core elements that contribute to the process of ad verification:
- Location verification ensures that ads are shown only to the intended audience in the right regions;
- Identifying fraudulent activity:
- pixel stuffing and ad stacking involve “piling up” multiple ads within a 1×1 pixel or layering many ads on top of each other,
- attribution fraud is all about imitating real users’ actions,
- location masking changes or hides the original, actual geographic location of web traffic,
- impression laundering (or ad impression laundering) is a tactic that involves exchanging the site URL for one that’s often less reputable in order to deceive advertisers and earn more money from ads;
- Providing ad viewability rates, which is a paramount concept in digital advertising, as it measures the likelihood that the ad will be seen. Ad verification that checks viewability rates helps protect advertising budgets and prevents wasting money on ads that are not correctly viewed.
Ad verification companies
Here are some examples of companies that provide ad verification solutions:
- HUMAN is a platform dedicated to digital publishers and tech platforms. It offers malvertising and ad quality defense solutions. In addition to its solutions aimed at detecting and combating bots and fraud, the company offers HUMAN Challenge, which is a reCAPTCHA alternative. You can test some of the features with the demo;
- DoubleVerify is a popular solution that can be used by advertisers, publishers, ad networks, and ad exchanges. The company uncovers emerging fraud tactics and delivers innovative prevention technologies with its Semantic Science and Fraud Lab departments. Additionally, it offers publishers a unified analytics platform;
- GeoEdge is a company offering ad quality solutions for app developers, publishers, and ad platforms. It helps protect users from inappropriate content, malware, and more. The tool offers a free trial;
- Fraudlogix is helping cybersecurity teams, ad platforms, affiliate marketers, and publishers by detecting deceptive behaviors like click fraud, cyberattacks, fraudulent payments, or invalid traffic. What’s vital is that the company provides services under a flat-rate pricing structure.
Safety provided by a trusted monetization partner
It’s great that now you know all the most vital things about ad verification! Just remember that by partnering with a trusted monetization partner, like optAd360, you can gain peace of mind without the need to invest in additional ad verification tools! We’ve got your back on all things ad safety. The quality of advertisements and ad-related solutions we provide ensures everything you need from an ad provider – from viewability to fraud protection and brand safety, we handle it all so you don’t have to! To earn more and not worry about safety, simply get familiar with our requirements and complete the registration form. See you soon!
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