The Seasonal Shopping Surge: Maximizing Cyber Monday ROI by Stopping Ad Fraud

Each holiday shopping period presents massive opportunities for advertisers. Many online retailers are preparing their media campaigns to take advantage of the expected surges in traffic, both in-store and online.

With the global economy, and consumer behavior, impacted by COVID-19, successful shopping seasons are more important than ever. Retailers are targeting an increasingly digitally savvy audience, which requires tailored campaigns to match. This increase in spending on digital advertising encourages the presence of ad fraud. Even brick-and-mortar retailers will still be using digital marketing techniques to drive footfall.

The Scale of Fraud

When we discuss ad fraud, we’re referring to traffic that's generated with malicious intent to either sabotage the advertising efforts of another business or for financial gain.

For example, a business may intentionally click its competitors’ advertising. They can click themselves, use programmatic scripts, or engage third parties that are experts in this kind of activity. The objective is to drain their competitors’ ad budgets so that fewer ads are shown to real users, making it harder for those retailers to attract new customers.

Engagements from ad fraud deliver no advertising return on investment. When online retailers are losing as much as 20 percent of their digital marketing budgets to fraudulent or invalid traffic, advertisers with no protection in place are essentially throwing away budget. Putting that in perspective, an e-commerce vendor with an advertising budget of $150 million could be losing $30 million to ad fraud and bots.

The problem doesn’t just stop with the largest retailers. SMBs with limited budgets are also victims of ad fraud as they generally have less or no protection, which makes them an easy target for bad actors. In an opportune period, it’s a loss they just can’t afford.

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