Ad Fraud & App Retention: Combat Strategies for 2020

Introduction

By 2023, mobile apps are projected to generate more than USD 935 billion in revenues via paid downloads and in-app advertising. Mobile is clearly a driver for growth and not just an additional marketing channel.

Globally, mobile advertising spending is expected to surpass USD 240 billion USD by 2022. In 2020, the average smartphone user had about 30 apps on their mobile, and in the first half, consumers have spent about USD 50 billion on app purchases.

Industry experts feel that 2021 will be a transformative year for mobile marketing in terms of acquisition and retention strategies.

It’s imperative, therefore, for marketers to detect and reduce fraud. That is the subject of this insight-packed webinar with Ray Salloom, Senior Customer Success Manager of Scalarr, and Akshatha Kamath, Head of Content Marketing, MoEngage.

Scalarr uses an innovative Machine Learning based fraud detection tool for app developers and marketing teams. It protects them against app install ad fraud and prevents losses while they run acquisition campaigns.

Read on to find out the main challenges ahead, and ways to overcome them.

Identifying and understanding types of mobile ad fraud

Most marketers identify various types of mobile fraud. The most common are:

• Smart bots
• Intelligent device farms
• Mixed fraud, which combines regular and irregular traffic
• Click spam
• Incentive spams
• Complex VTA Spoofing

This means there’s a varying range of malpractice, based on Scalarr’s analysis of millions of installs per month. From December 2019 to February 2020, smart bots were about 36 percent of the traffic, modified click spam was 29 percent, and other bots and device farms comprised 24 percent.

This was a significant shift from March to May of the same year. 44.5 percent were bots and device farms, 41 percent smart bots, and 7 percent modified click spam.

For any company, having a complete solution to tackle all these fraud types is critical, feels Salloom.

He has also recently seen an emerging and dangerous trend of AI-powered click hijacking. This is a form of fraud in which an attacker can entice the victim to perform an unintended action from which the attacker can benefit. For example, online money transactions, sharing malicious website links, initiating social networking links, and so on.

Understanding and addressing Complex VTA Spoofing

Complex VTA Spoofing is one of the newest types of mobile app fraud that was noticed by Salloom and his team, from mid-2019. It is a form of continuous reverse engineering performed by fraudsters who wish to remain undetected. These installs are completed by MMPs or mobile measurement partners, as view-through attribution.

Complex VTA Spoofing is a method of faking tracking links to spoof clicks as impressions. View-through attribution has become the preferred choice of fraudsters. They use it to hide spam clicks, views and steal organic traffic under the radar. Naturally, these are harder to detect.

How does it work?

• Trackers receive a tracking link from the publisher for view-through attribution purposes.
• Fraudsters use this link to target users who are just browsing websites, watching an ad organically to generate fake clicks without the user’s knowledge.
• At the same time, fraudsters replace the click link with the view link to conceal the abnormal conversion rate.
• Finally, these fake clicks are spoofed as views, and completed installs are seen as view-through attribution driven instead of click-through.

As Salloom puts it, “fraudsters stay in the shadows, and then they get paid. Pretty serious stuff, and something your anti-fraud solution should help you detect, so you feel fully protected.”

Marketers faced over 16 billion USD in losses in 2020 because of such attribution fraud. How should it be combatted? There are three tools:

• Machine learning and smart technology
• Standardized protocols
• Transparency

App adoption trends: Growth, Slowdown, or Relatively Unchanged?

Customer engagement is critical for apps in 2020 and beyond. In pursuit of this, MoEngage helps some leading brands worldwide customize their user communication at scale.

It looked at data from about one and a half billion mobile app users across 12 industries from North America, Europe, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. Through an analysis of these numbers, they developed a Covid-19 impact quadrant to find those that have seen a downward trend, those that have sustained growth, and those that have accelerated it.

The downloads versus active users give a sense of how such apps are performing.

Video chat, online conferencing, and entertainment have naturally seen exponential growth during the pandemic. Delivery apps also saw a huge rise in America and Southeast Asia – but a slowdown in India and Europe. Real estate apps in the Middle East saw tremendous growth.

MoEngage found that apps that performed well did one of three things:

• They had a business that could help users in current times. E-commerce or media, for instance.
• They were quick to adapt to changing times and offer services that mattered. For example, an alcohol delivery app also started delivering toilet paper rolls in Australia.
• They built in-app experiences that brought users back. For example, OYO, a global hotel chain, benefitted due to flight restrictions and lockdowns. 98 percent of their users kept coming back, because of games, newsletters, videos, and so on.

Structuring engagement approach & strategies

Where do mobile app marketers go from here? MoEngage also spoke to 50+ brands across regions to understand how they plan to navigate the future.

Among the growth-sustaining strategies was to understand consumer behavior, improve paid and organic growth and offer relevant engagement.

Bounce-back tactics included relooking at paid acquisition strategy, audit user behavior to understand drop-offs, and using subcategories.

Growth-boosting strategies included examining unexplored growth acquisition platforms, try for community engagement, and more personalization with segmentation.

In this way, such a combination of strategies to detect and block fraud, with techniques for further engagement, are vital for mobile marketers.