For as long as many of us can remember, advertising fraud has been a real and pervasive threat in the online marketing community. It's not getting better; in fact, it is getting worse by some accounts and far more sophisticated.
As the call for increased transparency and the elimination of fraud from the advertising supply chain reaches fever pitch (
brands like Restoration Hardware and others have recently pulled their AdWords campaigns entirely) the ad solution providers are desperately trying to play catch up.
Last week, for example, Google announced several measures it is taking to address concerns of media buyers using its demand-side platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM).
But will it be enough? Let's take a look at these three changes:
+ Google will start providing advertisers with more information about prebid and post-serve impressive that DoubleClick's Bid Managed detected and filtered out including invalid traffic details such as the total number of filtered bids broken down by type (such as sophisticated invalid traffic or SIVT and traffic from data centers, crawlers and other abnormal activity.
+ Google also indicated that it is now working with suppl y partners (including AppNexus, Index Exchange, OpenX, Teads and Telaria) to implement more auto mated refund processes from invalid traffic, saying that its current commitments cover 90 percent of inventory available through DBM. The aforementioned networks have committed to provide advertiser refunds on traffic that is identified as invalid for up to 30 days after a monthly billing period.
+ And finally, by the end of October, DoubleClick Bid Manager will only buy inventory from sources identified as authorized sellers in a publisher's ads.txt file when a file is available. Presumably, at some point, ads.txt will be a requirement for DBM.
