The fraudsters have not left any stone unturned as they continue infiltrating digital advertising campaigns not just on desktops but also on mobile devices. One such technique is click flooding. Click flooding involves clickbots employed by bad actors that inflate the impressions on mobile ad campaigns leading to producing skewed data for the advertisers. These fake clicks are generated with the intention of claiming credit for any last-click post which an install happens at the user’s end.
As a result, the publishers running the mobile ad campaigns are devoid of the revenue arising out of genuine engagements and installs. Clickbots ruin the campaign’s metrics and leads to wastage of resources and erosion of trust in the publishers. Let us understand how click flooding takes place in detail
How does click flooding work?
The entire click flooding process is as follows-
How to detect click flooding?
Click flooding is a pertinent problem. However, its detection is not an impossible task. Through careful observation and analysis of some crucial metrics, this problem can be detected without many hassles. Let us take a look at what metrics can help us detect this problem
Click-to-install rate (CTI): CTI refers to the number of users who click on your ad and then install the app. Any publisher that reports an exceedingly high or low click-to-install rate can be a potential red flag for being a victim of click flooding. If the CTI rate is way below the historical trend line or if an ad network or publisher is reporting an outlier compared to the rest, it’s time to take some protective steps and conduct a deeper analysis of this metric
Click-to-install time (CTIT): CTIT measures the time lag between the user clicking the ad and the installation of the app. If we think from a user’s perspective, as soon as he/she interacts with an ad, they might choose to install the ad. Normally, the time lag between the two events can happen due to various factors like the speed of app download, internet stability, nature of the app etc. The question arises when for multiple installs, the time lag is uniform. This can be a sign of installs from click flooding as fraudsters might possibly be clicking the ads through multiple devices and thus there can be a uniform lag of ‘X’ number of hours between these clicks and the app install event.
While these may sound too challenging to detect, ad fraud solutions like ClearTrust provide a full-proof solution to tackle such challenges. Onboarding an ad fraud management partner can help you leverage fraud tackling to a great extent as we usually provide a bundle of solutions and offer wide advantages for each of them.
Be it clickbots ruining your campaigns, or fraudulent impressions generated from unknown locations and fake IPs, our filters can tackle various forms of invalid traffic thereby securing your assets.
