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The Best 5 Ad Verification Methods in 2024 And What You Can Benefit From Them
Time： 2024-09-24 10:58 Click：
Over the years, the digital advertising industry has been beset by a variety of ad fraud issues, including but not limited to bot traffic and fake users, all of which are attempting to cheat advertisers out of their ad budgets. An increasing amount of advertisers’ budgets is wasted on ad impressions that show up on fraudulent sites, fail to reach the intended audiences, or are not displayed correctly in the user's browser.
However advertisers and publishers don’t need to worry about this anymore. Ad verification has emerged as a partial solution to this problem and consists of identifying the areas that prevent the ads from reaching the broadest possible audience. It is like a hybrid solution that not just prevent fraud but also maximize ads spending and ensure high-quality impressions.
In this article, we’ll explore what ad verification is, how it works and top 5 ad verification methods people are using.
What Is Ad Verification and How It Works?
Before we dive into the best verification methods, let’s have a basic understanding of what ad verification is and how it works first.
Ad verification is a process that allows advertisers to verify whether real users are viewing their ads, and whether their ads are showed on the appropriate websites and in the correct context within the sites and seen by the target audience. With the help of ad verification, advertisers can gather metrics that report the viewability of their ads and what percentage of their target traffic is, and therefore adjusting their advertising strategies.
By assessing the contents on where the ad is displayed, usually a website, ad verification can confirm if the site is relevant to the purpose and preferences of the ad campaign. This is accomplished by placing verification tags in the ad markup.
These tags collect view rates, ad placements, or performance data and transmit them to the verification vendor. The vendor then forward these information to advertisers for review. Advertisers can take advantage of ad verification solutions to blacklist fraudulent publishers and low-traffic sites.
Ad verification is a process that allows advertisers to verify whether real users are viewing their ads, and whether their ads are showed on the appropriate websites and in the correct context within the sites and seen by the target audience. With the help of ad verification, advertisers can gather metrics that report the viewability of their ads and what percentage of their target traffic is, and therefore adjusting their advertising strategies.
By assessing the contents on where the ad is displayed, usually a website, ad verification can confirm if the site is relevant to the purpose and preferences of the ad campaign. This is accomplished by placing verification tags in the ad markup.
These tags collect view rates, ad placements, or performance data and transmit them to the verification vendor. The vendor then forward these information to advertisers for review. Advertisers can take advantage of ad verification solutions to blacklist fraudulent publishers and low-traffic sites.
Why Using Ad Verification?
It might surprise you that ad verification not only benefits advertisers, it is also helpful to publishers.
For advertisers, it saves their precious budget and enhance the efficiency of their ad campaigns. It also enables them to check if the ads are displayed as agreed upon with the publisher. Ad verification also prompts publishers to maintain transparent regarding how they achieve and represent site traffic.
For publishers, it enables them to control the ads showed on their websites and it reduces the risk of running malicious ads which may lead the visitors to abandon their sites and turn to other safer ones.
For advertisers, it saves their precious budget and enhance the efficiency of their ad campaigns. It also enables them to check if the ads are displayed as agreed upon with the publisher. Ad verification also prompts publishers to maintain transparent regarding how they achieve and represent site traffic.
For publishers, it enables them to control the ads showed on their websites and it reduces the risk of running malicious ads which may lead the visitors to abandon their sites and turn to other safer ones.
Top 5 Ad Verification Methods in 2024
Now it’s time to explore the best verification methods that both advertisers and publishers should know and use.
1. Human Trafficking Verification
It serves as a digital checkpoint to ascertain that the users visiting a website is, indeed, human users instead of bots or other invalid traffic by analyzing IP patterns, frequency caps, and examining mouse movements, etc..
It can identify wasted spend from fake clicks or impressions and make metrics better reflect real audience reach.
However, as bots are becoming increasingly advanced, it has to be upgraded and improved rapidly.
2. Ad Placement and Size Measurement Verification
Tools like web crawling can be used to automatically scan websites, determine if ads are displayed in the intended place, and conform to the expectations. This method protects against ad misplacement.
Sometimes auditing all placements manually can be disruptive and time-consuming. And the method doesn’t ensure viewability.
3. Viewability Verification
Viewability is whether an ad can be seen by real human users. It is mainly measured by adding a tag to an ad that measures the activation of the ad pixels. According to the MRC industry standards, if 50% of an ad’s pixels were rendered on the screen for at least 1 second, this ad can be defined as “viewable”.
4. Ad Security Verification
Brand safety is for advertisers to ensure that their ads are not shown alongside content that is not desired, such as violence or political extremism. However, detecting such content has been challenging even for the largest platforms. Although there are increasing number of advanced technologies that can be used to detect unsuitable graphic content or negative sentiment on a website, it is still impossible to reduce the risk to 0%, which makes constant monitoring a must-do.
5. Audience Check
With audience check or verification, advertisers can measure what percentage of their ad traffic came from the intended target audience. It help advertisers to refine their ad campaigns, but it must be carried out on available user data.
1. Human Trafficking Verification
It serves as a digital checkpoint to ascertain that the users visiting a website is, indeed, human users instead of bots or other invalid traffic by analyzing IP patterns, frequency caps, and examining mouse movements, etc..
It can identify wasted spend from fake clicks or impressions and make metrics better reflect real audience reach.
However, as bots are becoming increasingly advanced, it has to be upgraded and improved rapidly.
2. Ad Placement and Size Measurement Verification
Tools like web crawling can be used to automatically scan websites, determine if ads are displayed in the intended place, and conform to the expectations. This method protects against ad misplacement.
Sometimes auditing all placements manually can be disruptive and time-consuming. And the method doesn’t ensure viewability.
3. Viewability Verification
Viewability is whether an ad can be seen by real human users. It is mainly measured by adding a tag to an ad that measures the activation of the ad pixels. According to the MRC industry standards, if 50% of an ad’s pixels were rendered on the screen for at least 1 second, this ad can be defined as “viewable”.
4. Ad Security Verification
Brand safety is for advertisers to ensure that their ads are not shown alongside content that is not desired, such as violence or political extremism. However, detecting such content has been challenging even for the largest platforms. Although there are increasing number of advanced technologies that can be used to detect unsuitable graphic content or negative sentiment on a website, it is still impossible to reduce the risk to 0%, which makes constant monitoring a must-do.
5. Audience Check
With audience check or verification, advertisers can measure what percentage of their ad traffic came from the intended target audience. It help advertisers to refine their ad campaigns, but it must be carried out on available user data.
BitBrowser Provides Everything You Need for Ad Verification
BitBrowser can verify the effectiveness of advertising by simulating different users and devices accessing websites. This involves using different operating systems, browser versions, screen sizes, and resolutions to test the ad interaction in different environments and simulating users to confirm ad targeting and display positions.
Using BitBrowser, you can check at any time whether you can smoothly jump to the corresponding landing page and whether the content and functions of the landing page are normal to ensure that users can obtain the required information or complete related operations smoothly.
In BitBrowser, you can use the automation (RPA) function and window group control function completely free of charge to collect data related to ad verification, such as advertising click-through rate, conversion rate, and user feedback. This allows you to analyze these data to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and optimize it.
Implementing the BitBrowser ad verification process enables you to ensure that ads accurately reach the intended target audience while eliminating possible misleading ad content and invalid links. This measure not only optimizes advertising effectiveness but also significantly improves user experience, thereby effectively enhancing the brand image and expanding business scale.
Using BitBrowser, you can check at any time whether you can smoothly jump to the corresponding landing page and whether the content and functions of the landing page are normal to ensure that users can obtain the required information or complete related operations smoothly.
In BitBrowser, you can use the automation (RPA) function and window group control function completely free of charge to collect data related to ad verification, such as advertising click-through rate, conversion rate, and user feedback. This allows you to analyze these data to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and optimize it.
Implementing the BitBrowser ad verification process enables you to ensure that ads accurately reach the intended target audience while eliminating possible misleading ad content and invalid links. This measure not only optimizes advertising effectiveness but also significantly improves user experience, thereby effectively enhancing the brand image and expanding business scale.
Conclusion
Not only advertisers and publishers are affected by ad fraud, common internet users are also affected. Thus ad verification has becomes more and more important to enhance transparency and restrain fraudulent activities in the digital advertising space. At least both advertisers and publishers should know and use it properly.