Mobile Ad Fraud in India 2.4X higher than the Global Average: TUNE 2017

TUNE (http://www.tune.com), the global leader in mobile marketing solutions, today released a report on mobile ad frauds in India and across the globe. From January to June 2017, TUNE studied, 24.3 billion clicks via 702 ad networks and 437 million mobile app installs across 131 countries, utilizing TUNE’s anti-fraud technology, to track mobile ad fraud trends across the globe and more so for the India market.

According to the TUNE mobile ad fraud report, click fraud across the mapped ad networks stood at 15.17% of which 35 ad networks experienced 50% or more cases of ad frauds. In terms of mobile app installs, 10% witnessed a scenario of ad fraud.

The report further states that ad fraud in the Indian subcontinent alone stands much higher at approximately 32% and if not curtailed could cost Indian marketers a whopping USD $350 million. This implies that mobile ad fraud in India is not only 50% higher than the global average but also 2.4X higher as rest of the world.

On the mobile app installs front, India is amongst the top 10 countries with the highest app install frauds.  TUNE’s analysis of 437 million mobile app installs from 131 countries revealed that Guatemala has the highest degree of mobile app install fraud of 23.65% (sample size: 497,652 installs) while Poland has the lowest app install fraud with only 1.57% fraud on a sample size of 921,653. On the other hand, India with a massive sample size of over 100 million installs witnessed 16.2% app install fraud cases.

John Koetsier

John Koetsier, TUNE’s mobile economist said, “The rise of startups in India and the accompanying influx of funds from venture capitalists are driving entrepreneurs to build mobile apps and solutions in an effort to capture new market share. As such, the pace at which Indians downloaded apps in 2016 was 71 percent higher than in 2015 – and our data shows that segments like mobile gaming in India will double revenues by 2019. But the growth of the mobile economy in India comes with a sizable amount of ad fraud.”

Ad fraud exists in many different forms. However, there are three basic types of app install frauds that can also be seen in the Indian market:

1. Click fraud: fake click, genuine user
2. Install fraud: fake click, fake user
3. Compliance fraud: genuine click, genuine user, wrong user geography/profile/etc.

In addition, there are multiple kinds of non app-install mobile ad fraud, including:

1. Viewability fraud: stacked, off-screen, not viewable
2. Targeting/compliance fraud: served to real people, but not the audience a marketer wants
3. Bot fraud: served to bots or software agents, not real people; the bots may or may not click (tap) on the ads

As per the TUNE report, sub-publishers and re-brokering are the two industry practices that create cracks for fraudsters to find and exploit the system. In some cases, re-brokering happens more than once especially to sub-publishers resulting in poor quality traffic, poor-quality clicks, app installs, views or straight-up fraud.

On the other hand, many ad networks experience very low percentages of fraud, including plenty at 2% or lower, and a large number at sub 5%. The report states that half of the 500+ ad networks that have significant traction and traffic, have less than 5% fraud cases. However, the higher percentages of fraud in about 35 ad-networks bring up the industry average.

Sachin Uppal, CMO, Play Games24x7 and Ultimate Games added, "In a typical online fraud scheme, computers are infected with malicious software that directs machines called bots to visit a web page and then click on an ad or watch a video. Not just this, sometimes the legitimate organic traffic is spoofed to look like coming from an affiliate through cookie stuffing on browsers. And sometimes App Installs are driven with fake mobile devices by constantly changing the device identifiers. This fake traffic fools a marketer into thinking that he is getting a high volume of interested users and hence ends up paying to place ads and links on the website. Digital advertising has to be open and transparent, secure and auditable with a balanced and efficient ecosystem. So, it's imperative to have a 3rd party traffic auditing system. The only marketer who will not need a verification system is the one who has something to hide. "

Emphasising that kheplayrummy.com does not assume the risk of frauds but works on performance, Herat Maniar, CMO, Sachar Gaming Pvt.Ltd mentioned, "Mobile Ad Frauds are here to stay – these are smart underworld communities and believe in making a quick buck. This is their career path. They obviously move faster than marketers at their job. While several tools with state of art algos exist, frauds have been institutionalized by various stake holders making it tougher to crack – hitting genuine publishers the most. Its catch 22 – the advertiser wants performance, the fraudsters deliver it just like the genuine Pubs – marketers start working with frauds in a quest to meet their KPIs."

On ad frauds in mobile,  Ashish Shah, Founder &CEO, Vertoz added, “Ad fraud is a major concern that makes many people think twice before opting for online advertising. Vertoz is partnered with some major fraud detection companies which help provide a safe advertising environment to our customers. Over the years, Vertoz has also built a technology that helps us detect frauds and provide solutions to our customers. In terms of mobile app installs, 10 per cent witnessed a scenario of ad fraud, said the report released by mobile marketing solutions TUNE. As the report states mobile app install fraud has become a major problem in India thanks in part to the region’s massive smartphone explosion, app publishers’ desire to grow quickly and fraudsters who are gaming the system. Though ad fraud in the Indian subcontinent alone stands much higher at approximately 32 per cent, and if not curtailed it could cost Indian marketers a whopping $350 million. At Vertoz we are obliged to maintain a high-quality advertising environment for the sake of our advertisers as well as our publishers and web users worldwide. As we mentioned we use advanced fraud detection methods and have joined hands with Geoedge,a premier provider of Ad security and verification solutions for the online and mobile advertising ecosystem to make sure that all interaction with Vertoz ads is legitimate”.