TrafficGuard COO discusses ad fraud over Chinese New Year

TrafficGuard COO Luke Taylor’s thoughts on advertising over CNY, published in Branding in Asia.

Chinese New Year is a holiday period which sees consumers spending time online using services and apps that help them travel to see family, share and celebrate, entertain themselves and others, shop and socialise. The buzz of Chinese New Year across APAC provides a great opportunity for brands to engage this audience through all of the places they spend their time online.

Of course, there will also be lots of advertisers vying for their attention. The level of competition and demand means that advertising will be more expensive. This makes it more important than ever to ensure your campaigns are reaching a verifiably human audience. Brand advertisers and publishers should be wary of domain spoofing and bots as fraudsters attempt to capitalise on the high holiday traffic.

App advertisers should be verifying clicks, installs and engagements to avoid misattribution and SDK spoofing. CNY is a short window – If you waste time scaling without removing fraud, budget will be wasted and you’ll have little to show from the festive period. By making sure all transactions are valid, you can scale genuine traffic and capitalise on the opportunity that CNY presents.

As well as making sure that your traffic is not fraudulent, check that the traffic you receive is from your pre-defined target. From our data, we see a lot of APAC campaigns receiving out-of-target traffic. While technically not fraud, it isn’t what you are paying for and it can really impact campaign results.

Wherever there is an opportunity for brands to spend money on advertising, there is an opportunity for fraudsters to make money too. It is important to remain vigilant over CNY and for the rest of the year too!
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