If you’re running unprotected digital marketing campaigns, we have bad news for you.
The chances are that you’re losing at least 26% of your investment to fraud.
That’s right. The online advertising industry is ridden with scammers who are making a fortune
by committing ad fraud. Believe it or not, but they already robbed businesses of over $35 billion
in 2020 alone. Luckily for all of you, ad verification companies are doing the hard work
keeping your ads scam-free. By the end of this video,
you will understand how ad verification works and why it needs proxies.
So what is ad fraud? Basically, it refers
to the variety of methods scammers use to defraud digital advertising networks for financial gain.
The five most common methods they use include:
Pixel stuffing. It means that the scammer puts an ad in an invisible pixel
and places it on a website to farm impressions.
Ad stacking happens when a fraudster puts several ads on top of each other.
However, only one is actually seen by the website visitors even though impressions count for all.
Domain spoofing. While there are several different types of domain spoofing, the most common tactic
is fooling advertisers into thinking their ad is going on a good quality website. However, the
fraudsters put it into low quality or even unsafe websites, which may damage the brand's reputation.
Ad injections is the process of inserting ads to a page or an app without permission.
And let's not forget about bot traffic.
Fraudsters often run bots to generate fake clicks and impressions to increase their revenue.
Have you ever encountered these or other methods of ad fraud? Let us know in the comments below.
With huge amounts of cash at stake,
digital advertisers find themselves at war against scammers.
One of the ways companies fight back is with ad verification.
Ad verification is a solution that makes sure that ads are seen by
real people and are placed in a legitimate and geographically relevant environment.
Proxies are closely tied to this process. Let’s see how.
First of all, ad verification companies
use proxies to make sure that ads are placed correctly.
Let's say a fraudster has substituted a fake URL during an ad bid making an advertiser think that
their ad is going to a high-quality website. When in reality, the opposite is true. The
fraudster puts the ad on a sketchy or even unsafe page, which bots can only see. To
find out whether the ad appeared in the right place, companies run an ad verification script.
However, scammers often place bans on ad verification companies. That's where proxies come
in. They allow changing the IP address and looking like a regular user to let the script do its job.
Another important method is to use proxies to check redirection paths.
Scammers often steal clicks from legitimate ads by redirecting the user to their websites.
Fraudsters do this to lure unsuspecting users to their products or services.
Sometimes they might even try to install malware on the user’s device.
The third use case is checking how an ad appears in a localised context. If you place geographic
restrictions on an ad, you need to make sure that fraudsters aren't taking advantage of it.
If you're targeting users near your physical store or offering services in a particular location,
keep in mind that fraudsters find ways to feed advertisers fake location data
to get higher prices for their ad impressions. Imagine how much money
you'd waste if your ad appeared to users in Asia instead of the US? Proxies allow
you to connect from various locations to see how people worldwide can view the ad.
You won't be able to perform successful ad fraud
prevention without good quality proxies. Here are a few things to consider when choosing a provider.
First, make sure that the provider offers anonymous residential proxies. Second,
look for wide location targeting because it's vital for ad verification. You may also want
to make sure that the provider offers a good quality of its proxy pool and a reasonable price.
We know that there are many providers to choose from and testing all of them is too
resource-intensive. That's why we did the hard work for you. We tested a handful of providers
in our annual Proxy Market Research to see how well they live up to the expectations.
You can find the complete research in the description, but for now,
let's discuss how these providers performed for ad verification criteria.
Let's start with the anonymity of residential IP addresses. To check the anonymity we ran
some IPs through an IP database, to see if they have been identified as proxy addresses there.
The scale is small, but you can still see that some providers have a very low
percentage of flagged IPs in a database, but for some this percentage is high.
Next, let’s check the quality of a proxy pool.
One of the best criteria to assess the proxy pool is taking a look at its composition.
An excellent residential proxy pool should consist of ISP, mobile proxies, or mixed IP addresses.
As you can see from our data, most providers meet this requirement quite well,
but there are some exceptions. NetNut and Storm Proxies had many data center IPs,
which means that it increases the chance of getting blocked by websites.
SOAX, on the other hand, had a larger number of commercial IPs.
What about the location targeting? Most providers allow accessing a pool of IPs worldwide,
and most of them support country targeting.
SOAX, Bright Data, and Oxylabs take it even further by offering city-level and ASN targeting.
Now let's take a look at another aspect - price. When it comes to proxies,
you get what you pay for. A higher price means better quality and plenty of additional features,
but some affordable providers are up to the mark, too. The premium providers require
a larger commitment and sustain a higher price for traffic until a very large scale.
Bright Data, Oxylabs, GeoSurf, and NetNut are perfect examples of a premium provider.
Smartproxy and SOAX are two companies that fall somewhere in-between. If SOAX still
leans more toward premium services, Smartproxy starts from as low as 5 GBs (the $75 plan) and
continues to undercut the competition up until the 1 TB price. There are also very cheap
providers such as Storm Proxies and Packet Stream but don't expect great performance.
All of the tests considered,
we think that these are the best ad verification proxy providers of 2021:
SOAX: for offering a wide range and flexible location targeting
that will cover all ad verification needs.
Oxylabs: for overall excellent performance and wide location targeting.
Bright Data: for great performance and a strong ecosystem.
Smartproxy: for rivaling its competition in quality but at a great price point
GeoSurf: for keeping up with the premium provider competition despite a much smaller proxy pool.
PacketStream:
while scarce in performance, this provider will be perfect for those looking to save on price.
I hope this helps you to pick the best provider for your needs. You'll find the
links to all of the mentioned providers in the description. If you still have any questions,
don't hesitate to leave them in the comments, and we will get back to you. That's it for now,
don't forget to check out our Proxy Service Awards video to find out more about the best
proxy providers currently on the market. Don’t forget to subscribe for more videos like this one!