Solve Media has recently issued its annual bot traffic market advisory report, which completes the first year over year analysis of suspicious web and mobile activity. The report found that suspicious web activity went up by 40% in the United States in 2013. Mobile web traffic also saw a dramatic increase of suspicious traffic, which went up by 30% during the same period.
Solve Media CEO, Ari Jacoby, said, “With the holiday season comes an increase in advertising spend. It’s not surprising that there was a spike in suspicious traffic in Q4. With US advertising budgets expected to top 182B by 2015, brands and publishers must both commit to adopting fraud prevention measures now. Aggressive botnet operations are not only stealing marketers hard fought budgets, they’re also creating false results on campaign performance. This inaccurate data is being utilized to drive future optimization decisions, compounding the problem.”
The full report from Solve Media comes with a recommendation to both publishers and advertisers that they make anti-fraud technologies a priority immediately. Without serious investments in anti-fraud systems, the digital marketing industry will lose all credibility with advertisers.
While there is virtually no limit on the growth opportunities of digital advertising in the future, it is at significant risk due to the fact that such a huge percentage of advertisements aren’t even seen by human eyes. As more and more brands come to see this fact, they will begin pulling their ad dollars out of the market.
Dave Martin, SVP of Media Services at Ignited said, “As an agency, we want and need our customers to trust that we are serving their ads to real humans that will help them achieve their goals. In order to deliver that, we work hard to verify the results of each campaign we run and ensure our customers that the audience they’re getting in front of is not just relevant but is in-fact made up of real people who are capable of engaging with the brand and taking action.”
While there have been steps taken by some advertising agencies, the problem continues to grow. Digital advertising networks, marketers and brands will all need to watch this situation carefully to see what impact it has on the effectiveness of digital advertisements.
You can see more about this report HERE.
