Editor's note: A previous version of this article reported that AppNexus found 65% of its inventory to be fraudulent, based on original reporting by Digiday. This article has been updated to reflect that AppNexus claims the figure was incorrect. AppNexus says platform transactions fell 65% after filtering its inventory for fraud.
Dive Brief:
- After filtering its ad inventory for fraud, AppNexus claims it saw transactions drop 65% due to the company encouraging sellers to only resell inventory bought directly from publishers.
- The upside of cleaning its inventory of fraudulent ads was an increase in view-through rates of 75% and post-click conversion was up 130% because of the higher quality inventory.
- Integral Ad Science’s second-quarter Media Quality Report released last month found ad fraud in slight decline by 3%.
Dive Insight:
AppNexus, the programmatic ad tech company, decided to take ad fraud head-on and applied filters to its inventory to suss out fraudulent ads.
An article by Digiday originally reported that AppNexus found 65% of its impressions to be fraudulent. The figure raised eyebrows, with some observers criticizing AppNexus in the wake of the report. AppNexus claims that figure is incorrect and should have referred to platform transactions, not ad fraud. AppNexus says it saw transactions drop by 65% on a pre-bid basis due to encouraging sellers to only resell inventory bought directly from publishers, and in some cases suspending seats. AppNexus says it is cutting down on transactions by reducing intermediation, which is the same impression bouncing between multiple networks before having an ad served against it.
A spokesperson for AppNexus explained to Marketing Dive that "by encouraging sellers to re-sell only inventory that they bought directly from publishers, we have removed layers of intermediation. The same impression that may once have been passed along between various ad networks and SSPs on our platform will now pass between fewer hands. The result is fewer transactions — but more spend reaching the publisher."
The announcement on the filtering results came at ExchangeWire’s ATS London event. After the presentation AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley said the programmatic company has both the “scale and mandate” to confront this industry-wide problem. “We’re very proud to be out front on this. We took sophisticated and aggressive measures that delivered markedly higher CPMs for publishers and heightened view-through rate and post-click conversion rates for advertisers,” O’Kelley said.
Ad fraud is an ongoing issue for the industry overall, but there may be at least a small ray of light. Integral Ad Science’s second-quarter Media Quality Report released last month uncovered a slight 3% drop in ad fraud from 14% to just over 11%.