5 ways proactive fraud prevention drives growth

This article was written by TrafficGuard Founder and COO, Luke Taylor for TotalRetail.

As consumers in North America get ready for the holiday shopping season, retail marketing teams are preparing for a huge wave of shopping intent and the increase of free time that comes with the holiday season. With e-commerce spend between Thanksgiving and Christmas forecast to hit $142 billion in the U.S. this year, the holidays present a big opportunity for retailers. But what if I told you that there was a year-round opportunity to improve your advertising return on investment by as much as 30 percent?

Innovative marketers around the world are starting to recognize a substantial growth opportunity in ad fraud prevention. Traditionally perceived as a solution to recover media spend or reduce risk, a new proactive generation of fraud prevention solutions work to actually drive growth.

But what does proactive fraud prevention really mean? Rather than just helping brands recover ad spend when fraud infiltrates their campaigns, proactive fraud prevention stops fraud before it has a chance to impact the advertiser.
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1. Ad Spend Delivers Genuine Ad Engagement

Your entire ad budget should go towards reaching real people with the potential to become your customers. Without proactive fraud prevention, it’s inevitable that an amount of your ad spend will be wasted on ad fraud.

This year there are only 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. What if 25 percent of your budget in that time goes to fraud? You may be able to recover that ad spend at the end of the month, but by then the holiday shopping surge will have passed. Using proactive fraud prevention, ad fraud is blocked in real time and your budget goes towards genuine advertising engagement, helping you capitalize on this major seasonal window of opportunity.
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2. Greater Reach

Sometimes we hear marketers say that they want to reach more users, but they don’t want to use ad networks because they perceive a greater risk of ad fraud. With a proactive fraud prevention solution in place, you can use ad networks confidently knowing that fraud is being removed from your campaign traffic. Improving reach means that you can grow your customer base faster, acquire customers more economically (in comparison to premium channels), and optimize towards those that deliver the highest value to your business.
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3. Faster Optimization With Clean Data

The traditional reactive approach to managing ad fraud means that the data you have on your traffic is constantly skewed by the presence of fraud. Real-time fraud prevention means that fraud doesn’t infiltrate your campaign metrics, data stays clean, and you can make faster and more effective optimization decisions.
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4. High-Value Customer Acquisition From Improved Optimization

Improved scale, more customers and clean data drive improved campaign optimization towards high-value customers and users. With less time spent on media volume reconciliation, or trying to optimize when your campaign data is riddled with ad fraud, you can spend more time looking at your most valuable users and optimizing your campaigns to get more and more of them.
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5. Improved ROI

The byproduct of all this is improved advertising ROI through both a reduction in ad spend wasted on ad fraud and improved advertising performance. In addition to each of these factors driving ROI, they reinforce each other in a continuous process of growth, like the gift that keeps giving!

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Proactive Fraud Prevention: The Gift That Keeps Giving

Protecting your advertising campaigns this holiday season with a proactive solution will ensure that your ad spend isn’t wasted on ad fraud, but rather invested in genuine ad engagement. And crucially, you’ll be able to safely scale and optimize in the lead-up to and over those 27 peak shopping days to maximize your advertising ROI.

However, the benefit doesn’t stop there. Proactive, real-time fraud prevention will keep driving advertising performance long after Santa returns to the North Pole.

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