#Ad Validation

Performance indicators are a vital tool in the digital marketing process, allowing advertisers to gauge the success of their advertising efforts through a variety of metrics. As consumer attention becomes more fragmented and ad blindness rises, traditional metrics such as CTR, impressions, or ad frequency are increasingly falling short of telling the whole story. Views, impressions, and clicks are important, but are often touted as the end-goal or evidence of ultimate advertising effectiveness. Times and audiences are changing, and advertisers will need more advanced means of measuring success if they want to keep up. Let’s take a look at some alternate metrics that advertisers can use to better understand the big picture of their marketing efforts.

The Google Antitrust Case Probably Shut Down AppNexus They say time ravages all; well, time and AI have now caught up with one of the first big programmatic institutions. AppNexus wasn’t the first to engage in real-time bidding, but it was perhaps the first major platform that basically created and popularized the concept of a DSP. In 2018, AT&T bought AppNexus and renamed it to Xandr, before selling it once again to Microsoft in 2021. The company served ads as Microsoft Invest for a few years, but the tech giant has announced that the DSP will be shutting down for good next year.

Pew research reports that around 86% of Americans consume news on smart devices like phones and tablets at least some of the time, while 57% do so “often.” Though television, radio, and print media still have their audiences, they are significantly outpaced by digital platforms, which are typically ad-supported. Simply put, the advertising audience for news is huge. Many advertisers are concerned about placing ads next to news reports, fearing that contentious topics or other bad news will cast a poor light on any ads surrounding the content. As always, we should look to the data for the truth: context does matter, but advertisers have nothing to fear about placing ads on news sites.

MFA, or “Made For Advertising”, is the boogeyman of digital advertising, scooping up some $20 billion of wasted ad spend on bot sites, unviewable ads, or ad farms. The Association of National Advertisers reports that buyers have been spending less on MFA overall in the last few years, but it’s been on the rise in recent months. We all know MFA sites when we see them; so why are they so hard to circumvent? Part of it is the lengths such sites will go to trick algorithms and ad servers into placing ads there, but it runs deeper than that alone: there are different levels of MFA, and that makes defining them a challenge. This is why it is not just as important as ever but is required to have additional protection and filtration for your ad buying process. In this article, you will learn just how Genius Monkey is able to identify these and help avoid MFA sites not just on the post-serving side but to avoid them pre-bid.

If you live in the U.S. and have been on the internet this month, there’s a good chance you’ve been on YouTube. The video platform hosts more than 2.7 billion active users, and no platform can get that popular without seeing its fair share of controversies. Lately, YouTube has been making some not-so-great headlines that demonstrate the importance of knowing the entire customer journey in your programmatic campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at impression tracking and what we can learn about it from YouTube.

Wherever services can be exchanged for money, you’ll find not-so-great artists trying to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Made-for-advertising sites are a barely-legal scam that everyone recognizes when they see it, but it’s still going to eat up around $20 billion dollars in ad spend this year. How does this happen, and – more importantly – how can you minimize its impact on your business? Genius Monkey is here to break down what you need to know about these sites and how to beat it.

Getting clicks on your ad can be exciting, but a savvy marketer knows that a click isn’t too impressive on its own – it’s conversions that really count. That said, it is a necessary stepping stone: the moment a customer enters or moves along the sales funnel. A click is a good thing because it represents a consumer willing to take action… or at least it can. Some are better than others, and if you want to get conversions, you need to make sure you’re getting the right kind of clicks.

Today’s modern landscape opens up tons of possibilities for business owners and marketers, especially those running things completely online. A myriad of tools are available to help even a solo-operated e-commerce business keep up with the big players, and many of the newest toys are powered by AI. Let’s take a closer look at how artificial intelligence is affecting the e-commerce industry and how you can take advantage of it moving forward!

What is the Metaverse? According to Facebook, the Metaverse is a virtual arena, where “3D spaces in the metaverse will let you socialise, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond what we can imagine.” They go on to explain that this space will be created by everyone and built for everyone to enjoy. Put simply, it’s a virtual world of interconnected communities. In the Metaverse, people can chat, work, play games, and interact through virtual reality. This announcement has opened doors to a new world—literally—but with that announcement also comes some logistical challenges and questions regarding advertising, marketing, and social interaction in general.

On November 10 in 2021, Russian cybercriminal Aleksandr Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his digital ad scam, stealing more than $7 million from U.S. advertisers and publishers for more than 2 years. How did he do it? Russian “King of Ad Fraud” Gets Caught In 2014, Zhukov started an advertising network and received payments from other ad networks to place advertisements on websites. But instead of putting ads on real web pages, he rented 2,000 computer servers and put them in data centers, programming them to act like humans viewing ads.