The ads published in websites are for attracting people. If people believes the ad worthy or useful, then he/she clicks on the ad. But, a German mobile-marketing company Trademob has found that 40 percent of mobile clicks on ads are essentially useless. In fact, clicking on the ads via mobile are the result of accidental presses or fraud.
German mobile app marketing platform Trademob, which was founded in 2010, aggregates more than 100 mobile ad networks and offers post-download conversion tracking to measure advertising efficiency. Earlier this summer, the company studied 6 million clicks around the world over six weeks. Trademob shared their new research result with GigaOM.
Trademob has found the following result from their study :
- Mobile-ad click fraud is apparently growing fast.
- 40 percent of clicks are essentially worthless, creating a conversion rate to install an app from an app store of less than 0.1 percent.
- 22 percent of clicks are accidental, while 18 percent are fraudulent.
- 8 percent of clicks are created by an app publisher who uses a server to register false clicks.
Alexander Franke, COO of Trademob told the GigaOM reporter Ryan Kim over an phone interview that mobile click fraud falls into two main categories. One is server side and the other botnets/client side. It is found that while some app publisher uses a server to register false clicks, on the other side, fraudsters hide one banner ad behind another in order to get credit for both clicks (in some cases). Therefore, 10 percent of useless clicks are done for these two methods.
According to the study, at the beginning of the year, fraud accounted for 10% of mobile-ad clicks. But now, it accounts for 18% mobile-ad clicks.
Trademob uses a tracking software to analyze the header data and IP addresses from clicks. The tracking software can identify server-side fraud when clicks come from that same IP addresses. But, accidental clicks are more bigger problem than fraud. It could be accidental clicks on ads happen due to small screen devices.
But the fact is, there are many shady publishers who intentionally place big banner ads next to small buttons to induce accidental clicks. But Trademob’s tracking software can identify those persistent bad publishers and add them to its blacklist so that won’t be able to advertise anymore.
According to Franke, Trademob has the best data around mobile clicks because of its sophisticated post-click analytics.
Now, it’s time to see what the shady publishers do regarding their ads.
Source : GigaOM
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