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As tools and technologies evolve, so too do the methods of bad actors looking to make a buck off advertiser’s honest work. Enter SIVT, or Sophisticated Invalid Traffic. This term describes the next generation of MFA and – as the name suggests – they can be complicated to detect and avoid. Let’s take a look at some examples of SIVT and discuss how Genius Monkey advertisers can beat the new Bots.
Stealing Takes a Village: BotNets
Click bots have been around for some time, stealing impressions and money by delivering useless clicks and views. Thankfully, their automated nature has made them easier to detect, so many services can now filter out or avoid bot clicks.
To circumvent this, fraudsters have made bots more clever through botnets, which are a network of hijacked devices working in concert to simulate human behavior. The bots are still clicking ads at a rapid pace, but now they’ll throw in simulated mouse movements and scrolling to trick the bot-detection service.
The famous Methbot was an early example of a botnet, and the unfortunate legacy continues today with large-scale botnet schemes that infect thousands of devices. It’s especially prevalent in the BitCoin mining scene, where users will try to download services (which may or may not work) and the botnet malware is snuck into the users device. BitCoin: not even once, folks.
Data Centers Disguised as Residential Traffic
Many digital ad validation services will use IP addresses to filter out likely fraud, drawing from databases that have flagged suspicious activity in the past. To combat this, fraudsters have found ways to hide bots inside of residential IP addresses, making it much harder to notice and filter out.
This is accomplished through the misuse of RPNs, or residential proxy networks. When infiltrated, these RPNs act as a giant VPN for bad actors, allowing bots to look more like humans browsing through residential IP addresses.
IP-based filtering has been a feature of validation software for some time, but this tactic renders it basically moot. But, as with all forms of fraud, it isn’t infallible. Bots always leave patterns and fingerprints, and a more detailed behavioral analysis can catch them even when they use these modern tactics.
The Evolution of Pixel Stuffing: Ad Stacking
Programmatic services have gotten better at tracking an ad’s potential viewability, fighting pixel stuffing by measuring how much of the screen the ad will cover. Not to be outplayed, MFA has evolved to stacking full-sized ads on top of each other.
In doing this, only the top ad is visible; sometimes none of them are. The ads are technically in the frame and taking up a significant percentage of the screen; this can make the website score high on visibility and trick platforms to placing ads there. Luckily, more advanced viewability measurement tools are getting better at detecting this method, but it’s still a problem for less contemporary systems.
Digital Trespassing: Ad Injection
This is when ads are placed on a site without consent of the publisher. Fraudsters will inject ad space onto a well-trafficked site and sell the spot as premium placement, taking ad revenue away from the publisher. They will also add links that redirect a clicking user to other ad-heavy sites owned by themselves or partners.
Ad Injection is particularly hard to deal with because it is most often the result of infected hardware. Users will try to download a sketchy browser extension and inadvertently download malware that injects the ads over the site the user is visiting. Ad injection is no fault of the publisher, and is instead reliant on advertising platforms chasing “high-quality” placements for unrealistically low prices.
What Advertisers Can Do To Beat SIVT
If there’s one connecting theme with all the methods shown above, it’s that they can all be detected and circumvented with modern, in-depth behavioral analysis. There are many great vendors that have adapted to the modern age of ad fraud, including Double Verify, IAS, Pixalate, and HUMAN (formally known as White Ops). Protection starts with a strong ad validation system.
Genius Monkey users can rest easy with our triple-layer ad verification system, of which Double Verify is only one step. Genius Monkey vets all placements and ad traffic – before and after placement – to catch potential fraud long before it happens.
Users can also work with our expert team to take some additional precautions according to their needs and wants:
- Buy only from sellers who have adopted the “Ads.txt” initiative, which strictly limits the marketplace to networks with a proven track record
- Only buy from Private Marketplaces, or PMPs. These are more prestigious placements that are significantly less susceptible to the chaos of the open exchange, but also tend to have less overall reach and are more expensive
- Track time on site, scroll depth, session duration, and other engagement-based metrics.
- Frequently audit performance using modern tools like ROAS for individual campaigns and MER for all advertising efforts.
Stay Ahead with Genius Monkey
Whatever the size, shape, or scope of your business, the best way to stay prepared for the future is partnering with a proven programmatic platform. Genius Monkey’s verification system catches fraudulent publishers and placements 130% more than the average platform, solidifying more high-quality placements for our users than anywhere else in the industry.
You want lower costs, more conversions, and you want to do it safely? It’s time to get in touch with the Genius Monkeys. Contact us today to learn how a data-driven programmatic platform can evolve your marketing strategy to the next level!
