Hidden ad impressions are created, unbeknownst to advertisers, when tiny pixel windows are placed throughout a web page allowing ads to be inserted into those invisible ad spaces. Alternatively, several ads are stacked in the same space with only the top ad visible. Both techniques are frequently used to take payment for placing ads without actually displaying the ad as expected by the paying advertiser.
Search Fraud websites are generated at a dizzying rate and are designed to be loaded with expensive keywords in order to attract ads but not the desired human traffic. Brands looking to advertise against popular keywords enviably buy inventory on Search Fraud sites resulting in extremely low economic returns.
Affiliate fraud occurs when robots are used to direct legitimate traffic away to affiliate sites from the actual site that created the economic value for the brand. Computers are overloaded with fraudulent cookies, when a customer gets directed to an affiliate’s site, the affiliate site is the one this rewarded and collects the referral payments.
Robots fill out thousands of forms in the blink of an eye while avoiding most anti-fraud systems. This costs firms time and resources to manage invalid applications.
AdWare fraud happens when a consumer clicks on a seemingly innocuous incentive, such as a web browser tool or extension, and consequently has a code injected into their system that is able to, without detection, generate impressions for a publisher.
This is the most insidious and lucrative type of ad fraud. All it takes is a simple line of code to change the URL of websites, even those on white lists and private ad exchanges, to make fraudulent sites appear as sites of reputable publishers.
Publishers purchase robot traffic to imitate very desirable types of consumers. Those robots then browse relevant websites in a way that makes them look like a qualified sales prospect, including clicking on ads and filling out forms.
Publishers often need to drive more traffic to their sites to fulfill a promised number of impressions and unique visitors for advertisers. Unfortunately, this is often done through the purchase of cheap, fraudulent robotic traffic that deploys techniques which can make the single robot appear to be in dozens of different geographical locations. By masking its configuration a single robot can appear to be thousands of different unique visits from around the country or world.
Excelaca can generate domain impression counts right down to a single ad placement for a full transparency report on every single ad served. Excelaca can provide the uncorrupted and controlled data to perform a Certified Audit. Working with a big 4 audit firms, Excelaca developed the ability to provide these firms with the data points required to fully assess digital ad success.
Often brands find their corporate logo on website deemed unacceptable or not aligned with the brands image. Excelaca developed the ability for each brand to decide for themselves which domains are unacceptable to be displayed on. When it comes to how the brand's money is allocated, Excelaca's Brand Protection Domain Controller gives a brand transparency, oversight and real time control.
The extraordinary level of widespread fraud reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is in part directly attributable to known, identifiable domains connected to organized crime syndicates. Since the inception of the Internet, these syndicates have been able to prosper due to directed efforts undertaken by incumbent service providers to obfuscate the scale of their impact on the digital advertising economy. These efforts include preventing third party digital advertising metrics and verification/research providers from capturing the full range of data that is accessible in an impression transaction inside of their networks. And more importantly, limiting the advertising buyers's ability to audit and receive refunds for money spent supporting this fraudulent activity. These impediments are enforced through contractual terms and conditions with advertising buyers. Among other things, these conditions often explicitly prevent or modulate third party access to these networks, which has limited the development and implementation of impression transparency technology and has enabled a thriving criminal economy on the Internet.
Digital Advertising Creates a Dangerous Cyber Attack SurfaceMost Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) are unaware of the attack surface that is created by a Company's digital advertising operations. Criminal abuse of digital advertising networks create more than just fraudulent transactions. Criminal redirection, site cloning and spear phishing are among the many cyber threats that are exploited using insecure and unaudited advertising networks. Enterprise Cybersecurity begins and ends with domain controllers. The Brand Protection Domain Controller (BPDC) Application Programming Interface (API) eliminates the opportunity for fraudulent entities to access customer facing networks. We eliminate ad fraud and stop this fraudulent activity by requiring your ad network(s) to request to serve an ad on a domain or in an application. We then create a secure audit trail by inserting a beacon or pixel into your advertisements that assures advertising network compliance with the BPDC instruction.
Real-Time Audit: Eliminating the DebateThe Excelaca Advertising Compliance Authority (ACA) Ad Network API eliminates ad fraud by requiring your ad network to request the ACA to serve an ad on a domain or in an application. If the domain/app is not a robot, criminal infringer or generating fraudulent impressions or clicks, we approve it for ad insertion.
Real-Time Intervention: Preventing Waste Before it OccursWe know how to manage the enormous volume of data involved in the digital ad ecosystem. The Excelaca Core is a unified real-time stream processing engine. It is a high performing, zero fault tolerant, scalable, asynchronous in-memory platform. The engine provides a complete set of system services freeing our engineers to focus on business logic. The platform is capable of processing billions of events per second and recovering from node outages with no data loss and no human intervention. The Excelaca Core enables complete transparency and delivers Actionable Business Intelligence to Optimize Digital Advertising Spend through Point of Sale (POS) data integration.
