#adfrauddetectionsolution

Ad fraud is not just a basic bot traffic problem anymore. It’s an issue contaminating the entire marketing funnel silently. Here’s what the data says, and what leaders must do next. 

Imagine spending ₹100 on a digital campaign and losing ₹20–30 before a single real customer ever sees your ad. Not due to a bad creative. Not a flawed targeting strategy. But because the digital advertising ecosystem, the programmatic advertising pipelines, the affiliate networks, and the ad placements, are structurally misplaced. 

The U.S. affiliate marketing industry is entering a new phase of scale.

It is crossing the $10 billion mark for the first time, up from $9.1 billion in 2023, and projected to reach $14.8 billion by 2028. With giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Target running large, complex affiliate programs, the stakes have never been higher.

But as the channel grows, so does the race to claim commissions (sometimes wrongfully) which can also look like this-imagine a shopper comes directly to your website, ready to buy but yet somehow, a third-party partner ends up taking creadit for that sale. Many brands are already trying to tackle it, but the growing sophistication of the tactic makes it increasingly difficult to control.

Many marketers still view ad fraud from a linear lens. They think bots are easy to spot, and platforms flag it. However, this assumption is no longer true.  

Over the years, advertising has transformed into a deeply interconnected, automated, and omnichannel ecosystem. Brands no longer run isolated campaigns. They operate across open web, apps, platforms, affiliates, influencers, CTV, and ecommerce media simultaneously.  

If you’re running app campaigns at scale, you’ve probably seen this before. Your attribution reports look clean, installs are coming in, and your ad fraud detection tool shows no major issues—yet the overall quality of users doesn’t feel right. 

For app marketers, with fraud checks now bundled into most attribution platforms, it’s easy to assume traffic quality is covered. But these validations are mainly built to ensure installs are attributed correctly, not to deeply assess how users behave after they enter the app. And that’s where things start to drift. 

Ad Spending in the US market will reach $421 billion in 2024. Out of a market worth $143 billion, TV and video Advertising stands out as the largest market there. Accurately measuring an ad campaign’s effectiveness is essential. It is the marketer’s job to protect against waste and improve campaigns’ ROI. Adopting ad fraud detection tool driven by AI-ML tech can achieve this.

According to the Statista Report, by 2029, it has been estimated that 87% of advertising revenue in the United States will be attributable to programmatic advertising.

India has witnessed an exponential rise in smartphone usage, internet penetration, which has furthered the growth of the Indian Digital Advertising ecosystem. Studies estimate that there were 624 million Internet users in India by January 2021 and the number of mobile connections was equivalent to 79% of the total population (1.39 billion is the current population).

Ad Stacking

One of the most common types of mobile ad fraud, ad stacking is a scheme where multiple ads are served and displayed at once, one on top of the other, akin to a stack of folders in offices. This gives a window to immoral publishers to say that the said ad has been served (even though it was technically never visible). This form of ad fraud is also referred to as ad hiding thus can be a major cause of concern especially when a brand awareness campaign is being run.

While online fraud perhaps started with email spamming, it has come a long way. Today, ad fraud takes many forms, and it costs digital advertisers several billion dollars. The lure of making quick money has motivated modern fraudsters to employ sophisticated techniques to commit fraud.

Every click and impression counts!

The dynamic landscape of digital advertising requires advertisers to maintain the integrity of ad campaigns. It might seem an uphill battle to optimize performance and safeguard the ad spend but proactive monitoring and fortifying their ad campaigns can protect them from menace like click fraud and spamming threats.