The global advertising market reached a value of US$ 590.3 Billion in 2021. As we look forward, the IMARC Group expects the market to reach US$ 792.7 Billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 5.2% during 2022-2027. With an exponential growth of ad investments there exists a greater risk of falling prey to ad frauds which can significantly tarnish your brand image.

Here are a few pertinent questions to begin with: Are you still draining money on ad impressions which end up on fraudulent websites? Are you struggling to reach the right audience base? Do your ads fail to display properly on the end customer’s browser? If your answers to these questions are in the affirmative, ad verification can open a world of opportunities for you. Here’s how:

Ad verification may help you to understand and address two key issues:

• How Programmatic advertising can be a very lucrative target for fraudsters
• Decrease in ROI

So, what is AD Verification?

It is a process that allows the advertisers and publishers to check if the placement of their ad is in the appropriate context, on the targeted website and at the desired slot, and last but not the least, seen by the  relevant audience.

To understand its need, let’s explore the merits from the point of view of two ‘actors’ concerned:

1) Advertiser

2) Publisher

Advertiser:

1. ROI:It helps track the ROI of the advertising budget and increases the efficiency of ad campaigns. It also verifies if the advertisement is displayed as per the publisher’s contract.

2. Brand Reputation:Preserving the brand’s reputation is crucial and one inappropriate ad placement can not only shake the brand’s persona but destroy it for good. For example, if an ad is displayed next to any inappropriate content like hateful speech, pornography, intoxicating beverages, misleading or false information etc., users may start perceiving the brand in alignment with those offensive content and build a negative or false impression of your brand.

Publishers:

1. Fraud Control: Provides better control over the ads displayed & decreases the risk of running fraudulent ads on their sites.

2. With a large number of network partners, it’s cumbersome to manage ad quality consistently. By implementing automated ad-verification technology, publishers can avoid displaying certain kinds of content on their sites, like:

• • Malicious ads (auto-redirects, phishing, drive-by downloads, and malware integrated into the pre-click or post-click)
  • Inappropriate ads (e.g., pornography)
  • Ads for illegal products
  • Badly targeted ads

What areas does Ad verification detect?

• Site context
• Ad placement
• Viewability
• Competitive separation (ensuring that ads are not displayed next to competitive brands)
• Fraudulent activity
• Frequency cap
• Geotargeting (IP-lookup)

So how does it work?

• Advertisers use the ad verification service to verify that the designated traits of a served ad matches the specified terms laid out in the ad campaign settings (e.g., site, geographical, or content parameters).
• To do this, verification tags are used along with the ad (inside the ad markup) to evaluate the content of the publisher’s page and confirming if the site is appropriate for the ad.
• The ad-verification vendor then directs reports back to the advertiser or agency so they can investigate data about placement, performance, etc. The point of ad verification is to have a third party that is impartial and can independently verify the delivery of the campaigns.
• The idea of verification is not to prevent suspicious ads from displaying altogether but it can help fend off publishers with low viewability or high fraud traffic early in the campaign by quickly blacklisting them.

Contextual brand Safety:

For protecting brand reputation, brand safety is critical. It makes sure a brand’s ad doesn’t appear next to inappropriate content.

So how does it work?

• Keyword Verification: It is used in campaigns to ensure brand safety based on the specific content or keywords found within the content of the pages where the impression is being served. For example, restricted category advertisements like alcoholic beverages. Failure to uphold this level of protection can result in costly fines for the brand. Many ad-verification providers and some ad servers have already introduced different categories to help advertisers decide whether the ad should be displayed on the page. This can include categories, such as:

1. 1. Adult material
   2. Copyright-infringed content
   3. Weapons
   4. Violence
   5. Hate and profanity

Other Challenges:

To add to the frauds, there are other challenges which can be a task to manage. These are:

• Multiple data sources – Increasing sources of data adds to the difficulties of managing and organizing the data.
• Single view – Single view of all data sources/ad pipeline which is meaningful to the end user.
• Time consuming and complex analysis to derive meaningful trends and actionable insights especially when it takes 400+ events for a single ad render.
• New connections: With every new data source, integration into the pipeline is necessary. And integration can run into issues.
• Flexibility: Changes must be handled quickly; these can be in different types of data or fluctuations in APIs.
• Latency: Extracting data in real-time from several different sources is easier said than done. There is also the issue of unoptimized databases for real-time processing, such as Amazon Redshift.
• Accurate and scalable: Data must always be accurate; the system should be able to manage data volumes and more sources.

Finally, faster verification and the ability to scale newer ad platforms without reinventing the wheel by leveraging the modular architecture will result in improved customer experiences, and it will offer the assurance the brand needs before putting another dollar on an advertisement.

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