Fighting Ad Fraud: How to Keep Your Marketing Budget Safe

Every marketer should take this issue very seriously: preventing ad fraud. Ad fraud costs steal budgets, distort analytics, and distort strategy.

Ad frauds themselves are increasingly complex, creating an industry that touches virtually every aspect of an app's growth - and, with not enough data and skills around being able to detect fake traffic and use the appropriate strategies to mitigate risks of being a victim.

With a single click, SolarEngine provides a FREE anti-fraud module and prevents from fraudsters stealing marketing budgets and guarantees user acquisition from the real people.

Dual Protection Against Fraud: Before and After Attribution

• Real-Time Interception: SolarEngine identifies suspicious ad activities instantly thereby preventing fake clicks or installs on time, ensuring no ad spend waste. In this way, bad data is no longer managed incorrectly to affect the building blocks models and their optimization decisions.

• Post-Attribution Analysis: Despite the impact of the live interception, some advanced frauds might get through the gap. SolarEngine applies deep analysis to every conversion data post attribution. SolarEngine notices extraordinary patterns and fraudulent clicks by cross-checking timestamps, sources, and device information with respective clicks, impressions, and installs.

With thorough monitoring, SolarEngine ensures that every step from the first ad impression to the final user conversion is watched, significantly increasing transparency and helping advertisers accurately evaluate ROI and ROAS, protecting ad budgets.

Three Fraud Scenarios that We Can Help with...

• CTIT Anomaly Detection: The click-to-install time (CTIT) measures the time users take from clicking an ad to installation. Normally, users install within a reasonable period. However, extremely short or long CTITs can indicate fraud, such as bot clicks or fake installations. SolarEngine attributes installations to the last valid click/impression within the set CTIT range, detecting those outside this range.
• Low Conversion Rate Detection: A low conversion rate is a direct indicator of a less effective campaigns. A lot of clicks but a very low rate of conversion are most likely to be fake clicks or click-farming. SolarEngine intercepts ad activities from suspect channels contributing to the efficient exploitation of the ad budget.
• Country Anomaly Monitoring: In overseas campaigns, you often want targeted ads for specific countries or regions. Even then, ads could be targeted wrong or faked for more ad spend. If you see differences in where installations come from compared to where people clicked/converted or where impressions were shown, then it is probably because of fraud. SolarEngine can intercept this refreshing itself, to save marketing investments.

Real-Life Examples

Imagine a global mobile game company, say GameFury, came up with a new strategy game and wants to launch it in the Asian market with a $1 million dollar budget.

• CTIT Anomaly Detection: GameFury invested $100,000 in specific channels which yielded over 50,000 clicks and 40,000 installments. But also this statement has to be taken with fraactional caution, since 30% of these installs had a CTIT of only 2-3 sould, which can mean fraud. These 12,000 suspicious installations have been detected to be intercepted from SolarEngine.
• Low Conversion Rate Detection:  On another channel, GameFury spent $150,000 and got 200,000 clicks, for which they achieved only 40 installations and 2 in-game purchases and got a 0.02% conversion rate. SolarEngine could identify this anomaly and exclude future ads from this channel to save GameFury's money.
• Country Anomaly Monitoring: GameFury invested $200,000, to get at least 100,000 new users in India. But there were 40,000 installtions from other countries, from Brazilians and Russians. SolarEngine could also intercept mismatched installations, saving marketing costs.

GameFury uses SolarEngine to track and rate the performance of each channel, save marketing spend, and get real users as SolarEngine stops most of the fake traffic.

User-Friendly Interface and Flexible Configuration

SolarEngine provides an intutive and clean interface to work with. Flexibility - compared to other platforms which they call one size fits all, SolarEngine offers customization so you can tweak rules fo CTIT anomalies, country anomalies, and low conversion rates.

SolarEngine provides advertisers and developers with a free anti-fraud feature that ensures the protection of data from fraud in a fair and transparent manner for each client, thereby allowing more advertisers to use their ad budgets without risks.