Mobile App Ad Campaigns and the Fraud Threat

Fraud is becoming a increasingly serious and costly issue for digital advertisers - and it is impacting mobile ad traffic more than ever.

In fact, it's estimated that advertisers could lose more than $6 billion globally to ad fraud in 2015, according to a study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and White Ops Inc.

Mobile attribution analytics and optimization solution Kochava has released new fraud detction and prevention capabilities to help mobile application advertisers avoid wasting their campaign budgets and skewing user acquisition data. According to Kochava, the most ommon fraud attempts in mobile advertising (those which can now be detected by Kochava's data science team) include the practice of blending incentivized traffic with non-incentivized traffic, "sniping" clicks, or the use of human or programmatic bots.

"Today, fraud in mobile advertising is real, and it's not only costing app marketers billions of dollars in wasted campaign spend, it's also driving faulty campaign performance results," said Charles Manning, Kochava CEO. "The problem is further compounded as this misleading data is then used by our customers to make their optimization decisions. Identifying and helping to eliminate this fraudulent traffic saves our customers money, and enhances their campaign optimization capabilities at the same time."

Numerous brands currently use Kochava including Microsoft, Yahoo, Pandora, Princeline, McDonalds and others.