As per an estimation made by Juniper, one of every thirteenth mobile app is a spammy one. There is no need to mention it as the phenomenon itself is very well-known: wherever there is money, there will be spam; a frowned upon but essential aspect of advertising. Every advertiser can see the flow of digital spending from desktop to mobile web and from there to mobile application. Well, this is not just true for the mobile app revenue, but the ad spammers tend to follow the same flow and get inside the system to gouge all the money into their account. But if the situation is grave, what should the developers and users do to stop it?
We posed the same question to Faisal Abidi, a marketing and branding specialist and co-founder of RNF Technologies. We learned why mobile applications are susceptible to spam, their kinds, and what metrics the spammers work. This article will act as a catalyst to get you in touch with the expert’s point of view so you can find the exact answers to these questions.
Therefore, go in to learn more!
App & Mobile Ad Spam
Brands make payments to web publishers, app owners, intermediaries, and/or affiliates who work hard to influence the targeted consumers, and the goal of digital ad spammers is to snap out this money as easily as it gets.
But what gives them the meaning and motive to do so? It depends on how the ad makes money– was the payment done per the delivery or performance?
Drawing out of his experience combating ad spam, Faisal Abidi quips that if the payment is made based on ad delivery, it is based upon impressions, which is why it is known as impression spam. Whereas if the payment is made based on the performance of the advertisement, the performance spam occurs after the action is completed, like:
- Cost-per-click
- Cost-per-install
- Cost-per-action
Now that you have a fundamental understanding of applications and ad spam, let’s get into the depth of metrics used by spammers to manipulate ad performance.
3 Major Metrics Used By Ad Spammers
- Number Of Users
- Some scammers have established armies of fake devices known as “device farms” to convince genuine consumers to download their apps onto their smartphones. These gadgets then download actual or virtual versions of the owner’s app, whether they do it using real phones or device emulators.
- Naturally, the more active software copies they have, the more users it appears, and the more ad impressions they can provide.
- Number Of Ads
- Faisal Abidi’s team at Phonato Studios, an app development company, encourages the use of anti-spam technologies because any app can be set up to request adverts at a much higher pace than it would usually to increase the number of ad impressions from its current user base. This type of spam is termed mobile device hijacking since apps “hijack” the genuine devices they are put on to transform them into impression-generating machines.
- Affected customers could hardly notice anything other than higher data usage and increased battery drain. The majority of impressions will be hidden from view to prevent user notice. In fact, the app may make ad requests even when it appears to be closed by leveraging device access permissions (which most users never read before allowing).
- Price Per Ad
- Spammers deceive marketers into believing their app is desired or that its users are high-value customers to raise CPMs.
- They accomplish this by offering false information about actual users and accurate information about fake users or by forging the details as per their free will.
Final Words
In a nutshell, you can boost your ad revenue by just tackling ad spam. But it is not as easy as it seems in theory; the only way to stop fraudsters is to outrun them rather than just keeping a step ahead. You can prevent impression fraud on mobile apps and guarantee maximum human reach by utilizing a clever combination of dozens of heuristics, cutting-edge machine learning, and human monitoring.
