Insights from Mobile Growth Summit San Francisco 2019

Mobile Growth Summit is the world’s largest mobile growth conference promising to bring together the industry’s most innovative and progressive companies. The 2019 San Francisco event did not disappoint on this front! We hosted a workshop exploring the role of machine learning in mitigating zero-day fraud. As a platinum sponsor, we also had the opportunity to meet with brands, networks and agencies at our booth.

Our discussions were largely around understanding more about how ad fraud is impacting app marketers. Here’s a recap of the most pressing challenges:
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Wasting budgets on ad fraud

Paying for fake installs or fake traffic is the top concern for the mobile app marketers we spoke to at Mobile Growth Summit. Juniper Research estimates that an advertiser with no fraud detection in place will waste 26% of an advertising budget to fraud. Fraudulent installs eat away campaign budgets and limit the optimisation opportunities to the detriment of ROAS.

Enlisting the help of a fraud protection solution blocking and reporting in real-time is the only way to combat this challenge and save wasted media spend.
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Reconciling media volumes

Another burden discussed with us is the significant lengths of time spent reconciling invoices each month. The purpose of reconciliation is to identify the volume of valid traffic and conversions in order to negotiate chargebacks and refunds. This negotiation is not only time consuming, but is prone to errors. These resources could be better spent working on strategic decisions to enhance the ROI of marketing efforts.
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Lack of transparency in reporting

Many networks we spoke to discussed the challenges associated with the lack of transparency when advertisers are working with an MMP or other fraud prevention tool. Fraud prevention solutions that do not provide granular level reporting make it difficult for networks to deliver strong ROAS.

A lack of clean, granular data leaves the network unable to quickly identify which traffic sources are sending fraudulent traffic and remove them. In turn, campaigns are optimised without clean data, which often results in the fraud-inflated sources being scaled and ROI restricted.

This lack of transparency is fuelling the rapidly growing ad fraud problem and collectively costing the industry billions of dollars per year.

To learn more about how to identify a proactive fraud protection solution, check out our ad fraud prevention roadmap.

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