Ad Protect: Mastering the Detection of Bot-Driven Ad Fraud – Source: securityboulevard.com

Digital ad fraud is taking billions out of marketing budgets, highlighting the need for precise detection tools that can identify suspicious clicks and fake engagement to safeguard your company’s ad spend. DataDome Ad Protect detects fraudulent activities driven by sophisticated bots, providing advertisers with the crucial visibility needed to optimize their campaigns and reduce their exposure to ad fraud.

In trials, Ad Protect was able to identify two times more ad fraud than other tools on the market—effectively doubling our customers’ savings. But how is DataDome’s ad fraud detection so much more precise?

Unmatched Traffic Analysis for Comprehensive Protection

Ad Protect analyzes both paid and organic traffic, providing a comprehensive overview of all data flowing into advertising campaigns. This extensive analysis allows DataDome to effectively differentiate between legitimate traffic and sophisticated fraudulent attempts. This detailed analysis helps accurately distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent interactions, empowering advertisers to refine their strategies and improve campaign performance.

Advanced Detection of Sophisticated Bots

The key to Ad Protect’s effectiveness is DataDome’s industry-leading bot detection technology. Ad fraud is predominantly executed through advanced bots that mimic human behavior, making them particularly difficult to detect. DataDome’s robust detection mechanisms are finely tuned to identify these elusive bots, providing a critical shield against ad fraud.

Leveraging Dual-Sided Signal Detection

Unlike solutions that rely solely on data from either the server- or client, Ad Protect employs a dual-sided approach. By integrating both client-side and server-side signals, we not only broaden the detection spectrum, but also significantly enhance the accuracy and reliability of identifying fraudulent activities. By capturing a wider array of data points, DataDome can detect sophisticated fraud schemes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Minimizing User Friction with Smart Challenges

To enhance its bot detection capabilities, Ad Protect incorporates proprietary challenges like DataDome CAPTCHA and Device Check. These tools are designed to differentiate effectively between bots and genuine users while maintaining privacy and accessibility. Device Check operates invisibly, providing a frictionless experience for legitimate users and only escalating to CAPTCHA when additional verification is needed. Altogether, these challenges combine with DataDome’s powerful protection to achieve a 0.01% false positive rate.

Platform-Agnostic Detection for Greater Coverage

Ad Protect excels in its ability to monitor ad traffic from any platform, not just the major ones like Google, Meta, or Microsoft. This platform-agnostic capability is crucial for advertisers using diverse and multi-channel strategies, ensuring that protection against ad fraud is comprehensive and effective across all possible avenues.

AI-Driven Differentiation of Human and Bot Interactions

Ad Protect does not focus on invalid clicks (or invalid traffic) like ad networks do, but more specifically on ad fraud. Invalid clicks include human repeated clicks, or traffic coming from IPs sitting behind a VPN or hosted in a data center, even if the source is human and legitimate. DataDome applies a finer AI-based detection that can differentiate bot clicks from human legitimate clicks—even when the traffic comes from challenging environments like VPNs or data centers.

Customizable Tracking for Tailored Insights

Recognizing the unique needs of each campaign, Ad Protect allows advertisers to use any significant tracking parameter, tailored to their specific requirements. This flexibility ensures that the fraud detection analytics are directly relevant to the advertiser’s key performance indicators, making the insights actionable and beneficial in optimizing campaigns and minimizing exposure to fraud.

Transparent Reporting for Informed Decision-Making

Ad Protect prides itself on transparent reporting, offering detailed insights into every aspect of campaign interactions. This granularity enables advertisers to trace the origin and nature of every click and HTTP request, fostering informed decision-making and precise adjustments to enhance campaign security and effectiveness.

Ad Fraud Traffic Across Ad Networks

While bot-driven ad fraud is omnipresent, its magnitude can vary significantly across different ad networks. Even within the same ad network, the impact can be completely different from account to account.

We analyzed the ad traffic for 20 of our biggest customers, and this variability is extremely visible considering the 5 major ad networks:

Depending on the customers’ campaigns, the ratio of bot-driven ad fraud can be as low as 2%, and can reach peaks of 100% in special cases. The extremely high values are only observed in special cases where the overall ad traffic is limited.

There is no magic formula to get rid of ad fraud, and specific, in-depth analytics are necessary to address the issue. Ad Protect’s powerful analytics and smart detection of suspicious traffic will get the job done.

Stop Ad Fraud In Its Tracks with Ad Protect

DataDome Ad Protect provides advertisers with a powerful tool to identify and analyze automation-driven ad fraud, even when perpetrated by the most sophisticated and elusive bots. By delivering precise insights and comprehensive coverage, it enables effective campaign optimization, helping advertisers to safeguard their investments and maximize their advertising returns.

Want to know more? You can try Ad Protect for free, or book a demo today.