Indian advertisers are losing INR 8 Crore a day through Click Injection Evasion

Mobile penetration is at an all-time high, and hence enterprises have had to go online to stay afloat. People’s perceptions and attitudes towards digital media shifted in the wake of pandemic. App and mobile advertising providers currently own the majority of the digital advertising space.

Today the majority of the digital advertising market is dominated by app and mobile advertising providers. Digital media consumption evolved in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As consumers lead increasingly hybrid lifestyles, mobile is the top-ranked priority at 77%, followed by social media platforms and videos. Mobile penetration is higher than ever, and businesses have had to move online to survive.

Such times make people more vulnerable, which provides new opportunities to the fraudsters. This year, mobile internet users in India are expected to surpass 600 Million.

Mobile ad fraud is plaguing mobile-based performance campaigns like never before, as fraudsters are getting smarter and using innovative and more sophisticated techniques to steal money. Click Injection Evasion is one such sophisticated tactic syphoning off enterprise ad spend dollars.

What is Click Injection Evasion?

To understand click injection evasion, we first need to understand Click Injection Fraud.

Click Injection is a sophisticated form of click spamming and a commonly used mobile ad fraud method that steals organic and quality traffic from other sources. Click Injection exploits the existing drawbacks of last click attribution model, and injects click before the lead is submitted or an install is completed. (To understand how click injection works in detail , read this blog.)

Click Injection detection using CTIT (click to install time) anomaly has been widely used by mobile advertisers in India since 2016. Evading this detection, a more sophisticated form of this fraud is click manipulation, a type of ad fraud where fraudsters, while injecting a click, backtime the click time to make sure it evades the existing click to install time algorithms present with existing ad fraud detection companies.

Com Olho calls this methodology “Click Injection Evasion”.

How does Click Injection Evasion work?

Click Injection Evasion, a sophisticated form of click injection fraud, is a type of mobile ad fraud that is advancing as the whole world turned digital and mobile.

Fraudsters work with programmatic ad networks or pre-purn applications i.e the mobile applications that are pre-installed on devices by manufacturer, and lace them with behavioural trackers and adwares. This allows fraudsters to hijack organic mobile conversions and also steal traffic from social networks reattributing them as theirs.

When more than 70-80% of acquisitions are done using social networks, stealing conversion traffic from these sources makes sense for fraudulent publishers.

Com Olho using deterministic and admissible in court data algorithms, has not only been able to detect click injection fraud but also as detected fraudsters attempt to reverse existing fraud detection technology. Using our patented technology, our algorithms in real time can measure any kind of click data manipulation for financial gains.

Who is affected by Click Injection Evasion fraud?

Click Injection Evasion fraud affects almost every player in the advertising industry, even if the consequences vary.

Networks and Publishers:

Click Injection Evasion fraud will take away the credit from the worthy and deserving network and publisher, depriving you to make money even if you get an install as a result of your genuine efforts.

Advertiser:

Even if the campaign was influenced by click injection evasion fraud, it may look that the advertiser eventually received the desired outcome that is app installation. However, it impacts them in multiple ways. To begin with, advertisers might end up paying to the network or publisher even if they earned the installation with the organic efforts. Moreover, such frauds manipulate the campaigns performance and view-ability.

This can also lead to a negative impact on advertiser’s decision making as they may keep spending more on fraudulent sources while downsizing the real and true performers. Needless to mention, that was not an ideal scenario to be in.

What are the threats that Click Injection Evasion pose?

Click injection evasion mostly affects the publishers who run digital ads across several platforms with the goal of driving app installations. CPI campaigns are usually run on multiple different ad networks, meaning that enterprises need to protect them across each such platform. The main threats are:

Exhausted Budgets:

Click Injection Evasion results in fake app engagements and clicks, wasting advertiser’s hard earned money that could have been spent on reaching real and genuine people.Many fraudsters also employ bad bots to increase ad views or clicks, which speeds up the depletion of budgets even more.

Skewed campaign data:

One of the most damaging effects of click injection evasion is the skewed campaign data that results from it. Marketer’s future campaigns and ad spending decisions depend on the data that they get from campaigns. Since any data affected by click injection evasion will be skewed, marketers will not be able to accurately identify which channels are most effective, perhaps, resulting in investing money into invaluable campaigns.

What can you do to prevent Click Injection Evasion?

Using Com Olho’s patented technology, enterprises can detect click injection evasion, a sophisticated type of click ad fraud, which is spoofing more than 4 Crore devices per day an affecting at least 10% of advertising spend siphoning off INR 250 Crore a month by digitally stalking over 10 Crore devices daily.

As the fraudster was able to evade click injection, it is clear that our digital ecosystem cannot be protected from this type of fraud using the existing traditional methods for identifying such click anomalies.

We ensure at least 20% Month-on-Month savings on mobile ad spends using their deterministic and patented algorithms. We also published a report that deep dives into a live case of a fraudulent publisher/ ad-network manipulating the click to install time and how using our patented technology, the company identified and detected fraudsters attempted to evade such click injection detection.

In Conclusion

The fraudsters’s ability to evade click injection indicates that the traditional methods for detecting click anomalies are insufficient in detecting and removing such fraud from our digital ecosystems. There’s a need for innovation at the enterprise level. Fraudsters are getting smarter day by day and are siphoning advertiser’s money by sophisticating their tactics.