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Ad Verification in 2024: Top 5 Methods & Their Benefits

Digital ad fraud is estimated to cost US$65 billion by 2023. Ad verification becomes an essential tool to make sure digital ad spending does not go to waste. There are multiple ways ad fraud can happen and as new digital ad formats are being used, new ways of ad fraud also emerge. In this research, we will list the latest ad verification standards and methods in 2023.

What is ad verification?

Ad verification is the measurement of whether a digital ad was subject to human traffic, was displayed on the desired location to the desired audience by the advertiser. Ad verification helps advertisers to collect metrics that reports the viewability of the ad or what percent of the traffic was on-target. The technical process of verification is usually done by the platform itself and reported to the advertiser or third party measurement tools are used by advertisers and media agencies as an objective measure on top of the metrics the publishing platform reports.

How ad verification is useful for businesses?

There are three major benefits of ad verification for businesses.

  1. Transparent Performance Metrics: Ad verification shows what percent of your online ads served their purpose. The total amount of traffic you received for your ad does not necessarily mean that the ad reached your target audience. Ad verification helps you filter out the traffic that wasn’t delivered to your target audience and calculate a more realistic reach for your campaign.
  2. Media Savings and Budget Optimization: Cost per impression (CPM) and cost per click (CPC) are important metrics for advertisers to determine their overall media budget. It is often negotiated with advertisers at a high level. Publishers may demand higher prices for viewable CPM and CPC. Therefore, driving savings with ad verification also comes down to the negotiation skills of advertisers and a culture shift in the marketing industry.
  3. Protecting Brand Reputation: Ad verification helps advertisers show their ads on credible sources and safe content. For example, in 2018, YouTube was accused of monetizing extremist videos. Ad verification can help monitor where your ads are shown and flag suspicious sources for advertisers to take action early on.

What are the ad verification standards?

There are two internationally recognized sources for ad verification standards, especially for international brands and advertisers. One of them is Media Rating Council (MRC) and the one is Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Ad measurement solutions can get their technology accredited by MRC. IAB currently does not provide solution accreditation, however provides certification for marketing professionals to understand ad verification technology in depth.

How do ads get verified?

1. Confirm that the traffic comes from a human

Invalid traffic, also known as IVT, is the traffic that comes from non-human sources such as click bots or web crawlers. Regardless of their purpose, they inflate the overall traffic and therefore the cost an advertiser needs to pay. IVT is tried to be identified by measuring the frequency of the queries coming from a source or what type of IP address the source has.

2. Measure the size and placement of the ad

Advertisers often run multiple campaigns at the same time or multiple creatives in one campaign. Manual mistakes while buying the campaign or failures of one of the ad tech tools used for digital campaigns can cause the wrong ad to be shown at an undesired placement. For big advertisers, it may not be feasible to audit every single ad, but platforms use tools like web crawling to automatically scan their websites, check whether ads appear in the intended location, and match with the expectations.

3. Make sure the ad is viewable

Viewability is whether an ad has the chance to be seen. As per the MRC industry standards, we have introduced earlier, a display ad is viewable if 50% of the pixels were rendered on the screen at least for 1 second, while it is 2 continuous seconds for video ads. Viewability guidelines are subject to change and closely followed by ad measurement technology providers to be in line with industry standards. Viewability is mostly measured by adding a tag on the ad which measures the activation of ad pixels. Major platforms like Facebook reports their own viewability measures but it is also possible for advertisers to work with third-party measurement tools and add their tags to their ads.

4. Check whether the ad is displayed on a safe platform

Brand safety is an advertiser to make sure their ad is not shown along with content that is not desired such as violence or political extremism. Detecting such content has been a challenge even for the biggest platforms. Back in 2016, Procter & Gamble as a major advertiser decided not to invest in YouTube as a major platform because of brand safety concerns. These concerns pushed YouTube to hire thousands of people to manually monitor and filter their content. Today, there are more advanced technologies used by platforms and measurement solutions, such as using image recognition to detect graphic content or scraping the text on websites to detect negative sentiment on a website. However, it is still not possible to eliminate this risk for 100%, which makes constant monitoring a must-have for brand safety.

5. Verify the audience of the ad

Audience verification enables advertisers to measure what percent of their digital ad traffic came from the targeted audience. As a big advertising ecosystem, Facebook already has access to the demographics of its users and Google has cookies from their users which help to build audience segments. These platforms can target specific audiences and report what percent of the traffic was successfully shown to the target audience, offsetting the metrics according to factors such as unauthentic accounts or incognito sessions. There are also third-party companies that build online panels and verify whether an ad was shown to the desired audience. These measurements are never 100% accurate given that online users can delete their cookies or use the internet in incognito mode. However, an approximate measurement provided by such online panels can still be beneficial for major advertisers and the cost of the service can justify itself if the advertiser can generate savings by paying only for on-target ads.

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This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Bengüsu Özcan.

Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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