Early identification solution to offer pre-bid fraud detection

Early adopters of the Suspicious Activity Detection product from Integral include SHEKNOWS, ValueClick and Federated Media.

"We believe that black lists and other forms of published fraud reports would make the problem worse," said Will Luttrell, CTO of Integral Ad Science. "These efforts would notify bad actors that they have been caught, at which point they simply register a new domain and continue their fraudulent activity. It is imperative that any and all solutions proposed to tackle fraud are proactive, predictive and both pre- and post-bid. This was our objective when we built our Suspicious Activity Detection last year, and it continues to be our focus as we integrate more partners into our pre-bid capabilities."

Tom Hart, VP of Ad Operations at Federated Media Publishing added, "By applying [Integral Ad's] suspicious activity score in both the publisher on-boarding (pre) and ad delivery process (post), we're taking active measures to ensure that brand advertising is protected from fraudulent activity and served to actual human readers."

Ad fraud is defined as any deliberate attempt to serve ads with no potential for human viewing - in other words ads created for botnet traffic, iFrame stuffing and ad stacking. According to Integral, when any one type of ad fraud - from click fraud to attribution fraud to impressions fraud - is present, it is likely that at least one other kind of fraud is also present.

That is where their new solution comes in. The tool works in real time to identify an unusually high number of clicks, for example, so that the publisher can determine what actions are legitimate and which are fraudulent. Those suspicious activities are then compiled and predictive insights are issued which will flag fraudulent traffic so that fraudulent bids and ads are blocked.

Tags: ad fraud detection, advertising fraud, fraud protection, Integral Ads, online advertising