Ad Verification: 4 strategies to protect your media budget in the Google Marketing Platform

Are you or your client’s ad spend being lost to fraud or invalid traffic? Even worse, are your ads appearing next to inappropriate or irrelevant content? With the landscape of digital constantly evolving, so too are the ways in which ad spend is lost by organisations and agencies alike to ad fraud and Invalid Traffic (IVT).

In fact, advertisers could have lost as much as $23 billion globally to ad fraud in 2019 according to CHEQ. Further to this, 2019 research from Harris Poll and (Google) 3rd party verification partner DoubleVerify has identified that 67% of consumers would stop using a brand product that appeared beside objectionable or fake content.

While digital advertising spend is expected to drop 0.2% across APAC in 2020 (to US$86.93 billion) YoY according to S&P Global (largely due to the current uncertain times), the industry is expected to bounce back in 2021 and grow 12.5%.

Advertisers not looking at Ad Verification as a way to protect their media budget risk it becoming part of the large amount lost to fraudsters and Invalid Traffic (IVT), particularly with desktop, mobile, social media and online video ads expected to account for approximately 63% of APAC’s ad spend by 2024.

In this article, we explore how to achieve greater levels of control and accountability of your ad spend, and how to apply Ad Verification techniques within the Google Marketing Platform, specifically Display & Video 360 (DV360) and Campaign Manager (CM) to protect your media spend. These includes areas such as Brand Suitability & Safety, Fraud Prevention, Ad Viewability and Geo-targeting.

Ad verification is the process that advertisers take to quality check their ads and digital media from a safety, transparency and accountablity point of view – ensuring they are served within brand-safe environments to maximise viewable and valid (fraud-free) impressions. This is acheived by displaying the right ads in the right context, at the right time to the right audience.

Advice from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) back in 2016 identified that both people and technology are key in developing and implementing an ad fraud prevention strategy which is why you should consider in-housing the Google Marketing Platform.

Importantly, given the size and scale of Ad Fraud all over the world, understanding which channels that the GMP, whether Display & Video 360 (DV60) or Campaign Manager (CM), will protect your organisation’s media spend is key to mazimising your ad spend. According to Which-50, some key stats to think about around Ad Fraud across channels and devices includes:

• Australia has the third-worst rate of Ad Fraud in the world (behind India – 39% and Columbia – 35%)
• Fraud rates are highest in mobile in-app video advertising – 36% for phones and 31% for tablets
• Web browsing on mobile devices ad fraud rates are much lower than apps (12% for phones and 11% for tablets)
• Display advertising has less fraud than video, and in-app is again worse than web browsing. Smartphone and tablet in-app both had Invalid Traffic above 20%
• Over 22% of programmatic OTT/CTV video advertising is invalid

As part of the process to reduce and eliminate Ad Fraud, Google has offered a refunds on Invalid Traffic by exchange since 2017.

A further example within the Google Marketing Platform on eliminating Ad Fraud, is the tracking of viewable impressions and determine the impact of Invalid Traffic (IVT) from the Active View reporting within Campaign Manager (CM).

An ad impression is considered as viewable if at least 50% of it is within the viewable space of the user’s screen – for at least 1 second for display, and 2 seconds for video.

There are a number of Viewability tactics you can use to ensure your ads are appearing in the right inventory to the right people, using Geo-targeting (location-based targeting) (see strategy 4 below) for a mobile-based audience group can be a powerful way to provide personalised ads that can achieve a high-level of viewable impressions at the point of sale where they can directly influence purchase behaviour.

Within the Google Marketing Platform, Active View tags are the tracking mechanism for the viewability of ads served through Campaign Manager (CM), however, you can set up your viewability settings within Display & Video 360 (DV360).

1. Open a line item or insertion order, and navigate to the Viewability targeting page.
2. In the Active View section of Viewability targeting, select a predicted viewability percentage to control what impressions your line item will bid on. Predicted viewability percentages are directly related to how viewable each impression you bid on is likely to be.
3. Click Done once you’ve set your Viewability targeting.

Geo-targeting is an advanced personalisation strategy that is used for driving in-store conversions. This involves verifying the location of your audience from a Geo-targeting perspective.

Importantly, within the Google Marketing Platform there is no need for a Geo-targeting verification partner. Geo-targeting in the Google Marketing Platform allows you to target people based on the latitude and longitude of their device then depending on their radius to the store different personalised ads could be set up via a feed in Studio.