There is no denying the importance of marketing in the success of any business. No matter what type of business you are in or what industry you are in, you will always need some form of marketing to keep your business growing.
But in the competitive digital age, marketing has become increasingly difficult: there are new technologies and algorithms to learn, and scammers lurk around every corner.
It is important to understand the importance of ad verification and the role that region-specific tools such as US proxies play.
What is Ad Verification?
Ad validation is the process by which marketers and advertising agencies determine whether their digital ads look correct and perform as expected.
Businesses are spending big on digital advertising: digital ad spending is set to reach $601.84 billion in 2023, which represents a 9.5% increase over the previous year.
With so much money involved, it’s no surprise that companies want to ensure their advertising is effective and profitable.
In pursuit of these goals, companies invest in advertising agencies and various marketing tools to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.
However, many businesses still don't realize the importance of ad verification to improve their advertising. Not only is ad verification essential to ensure that ads are displayed properly, it's also important to prevent businesses from becoming victims of ad fraud.
What is ad fraud?
Ad fraud is a general term that refers to any process used to manipulate digital display ads. Many businesses use digital display ads as part of their marketing strategy. These ads provide an opportunity to reach new customers and markets and increase brand awareness.
Scammers attempt to take advantage of the popularity of these marketing tactics and the fact that few businesses realize the dangers involved in them for financial gain. The tactics used by scammers range from simple to more sophisticated.
But at the end of the day, they all lead to the same result: eating up companies' advertising budgets without any return on investment. It's estimated that by 2028, $172 billion will be wasted on advertising spend due to fraud.
Types of ad fraud
As mentioned above, there are many different types of ad fraud. Some are as simple as simulating an ad click, while others are much more complicated. Let's look at the three main types and how they work:
Fake accounts and ad bots
Some scammers will use fake accounts or ad bots to simulate interacting with the ad. If the ad is on a restricted site that requires a login, the scammer will create multiple accounts on that platform.
They then waste advertising dollars by simulating interactions like ad clicks and impressions, but without actually buying them — meaning businesses pay per click but get no return on their investment.
Similarly, some scammers like to use ad bots, where the bots are programmed to automatically interact with ads until a certain point is reached.
Examples of this type of ad fraud include:
- Click fraud
- Click Injection
- Click Farm
- Simulation Traffic
Scammers often falsify website statistics to make them appear to be performing better than they actually are, in which case marketers think they are paying a high price for advertising on a website that has a certain amount of traffic.
However, because your statistics have changed, your ads won't perform as well as you hoped, and you won't get the return you'd expect for the amount of money you've paid to display them.
Examples of this type of ad fraud include:
- Geomasking
- Domain spoofing
- CTV fraud
- Device spoofing
- Impression Laundering
Impression laundering is a process used by scammers to place their ads there but invisibly. Scammers use clever methods to hide their ads from view.
They may stack multiple ads on top of each other so that only the top ad is visible and all ads on top of each other receive impressions, or they may obscure ads by pixels, making them invisible to the human eye.
Examples of this type of ad fraud include:
- Pixel stuffing
- Ad stack
How to check your ads
Verifying ads is still a very difficult task. Even ad verification tools are still not reliable enough and are often fooled by geo-restrictions, IP bans, etc. But residential proxies are one of the best ways to help you verify ads.
US proxies give you access to a large pool of local IPs that can check ads to make sure they are displayed correctly, allowing us to monitor and evaluate ads and protect you from fraudulent activity.
Not only can you check ads using the IPs provided by the US proxies, but you can also combine it with additional ad verification tools to get even more functionality.
Once paired, the tool is assigned a US IP address and makes it appear as if a real user is visiting your site, allowing scammers to detect and block your IP to avoid being discovered.
Also, using a US proxy for ad verification is not a complicated process. Even if you are not familiar with proxies, you can easily set it up and start using it.
So, unfamiliarity with these types of tools is not a reason not to use them to validate your ads.
The steps to check for ads using a proxy can be summarized as follows:
- Enable proxy to access US IP.
- Use your new IP to check your ads on the sites where you advertised.
- Verify that your ads look and work as intended.
- Optionally, run the proxy in conjunction with additional validation tools.
Final thoughts
Ad verification is a critical step in ensuring that your digital ads work as intended, and it also provides a way to avoid becoming a victim of ad fraud.
By simply using a US proxy, you get enhanced ad verification: not only will you not be blocked when reviewing ads, but you will also be able to use additional ad verification tools without being blocked.
