When one of the leading video platforms in the world wanted to eliminate ad fraud in its vast selection of inventory, it turned to White Ops. Through a combination of investigation with FraudSensor and deployment of MediaGuard, the company was able to reduce rates of non-human traffic by 94%.
The Challenge: Partners demanding fraud remediation
Eliminating ad fraud from its large inventory of online content was a primary concern for a leading video platform. Over the prior months, advertisers had become increasingly agitated with the platform, demanding remediation and threatening to take their business elsewhere.
This agitation was building because video can be one of the most fraudulent mediums in the advertising ecosystem. The most recent Bot Baseline Report reveals that as much as 22% of video advertising budgets can be lost to fraud.
The explosive growth in online video has created high demand for more inventory, and some publishers source traffic to meet that demand. The platform’s existing fraud detection solutions offered little help. It worked with three providers but received conflicting data from each, making it nearly impossible to root out the scale and source of the fraud. All of this combined made phone calls from advertisers particularly painful. Finally, the platform decided to pair with White Ops to solve the problem.
The Solution: Stop bots from ever entering the platform
Shortly after implementing White Ops FraudSensor, the platform learned that it had fraud rates nearing 30%. Because FraudSensor captures a variety of data at the impression level and can pass up to 30 different specific data points per impression, the platform finally gained a clear picture of its fraud problem. They were relieved to achieve exact visibility into all sources of non-human traffic and were able to formulate a clear plan to solve its fraud problem.
To combat the issue, the platform began using hotspot analysis to blacklist sources of obvious fraud. Each week, the fraud rates fell lower and lower. The platform then implemented White Ops MediaGuard to entirely block fraudulent traffic. In just a few weeks, the fraud rates dropped below 1.5% — and have remained so. The reduced rates have helped alleviate the cost of remediation to advertisers and reestablish the platform’s reputation.
