It’s been about a year since lockdown for COVID-19, a year of , spending days between different digital apps or trying out different hobbies when the apps get too boring or predictable. Although advertising had a temporary setback at the start of the initial lockdowns and economic instability, it quickly bounced back. Half of the advertising budgets in the States now are spent on digital platforms.
However, with this increase in digital ad spending, there’s a bigger need for security. Fraudulent attacks have become more common. Not all advertising campaigns can reach their target audiences, and a smaller number of advertising agencies have the capacity to put an end to fraudulent attacks. These companies are finding different ways to prevent malicious attacks.
Ad fraud dates back to around 1998, when the pay-per-click (PPC) model of advertising first started, for companies that wanted to appear at the top of search engine results pages when people searched for certain keywords. And when Google established itself as the top search engine that most people are using nowadays, to the point where the name has been turned into a verb, people with bad intentions tried finding ways to exploit and capitalize on this advertising model.
Soon after, bots started showing up, especially as digital advertising campaigns became more and more popular, thus going viral, and this became the biggest threat to security, for a while, and even as recent as last year, nearly half of all web traffic was made by bots.
But as all digital platforms started creating and developing better safeguards, these people with bad intentions also got better at their strategies and tactics. Thus, the age of web scraping, hijacking, acquiring private data, and distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) became prevalent across the internet. That last one is when a person can make an entire network unavailable to the users, which means entire services or platforms go offline.
These types of bots are continuously and persistently being used to automatically click on ads, which leaves those big advertising budgets empty when companies create PPC campaigns.
Meanwhile, consumers are more worried about big companies potentially invading their privacy when they see ads following them on other websites and platforms.
These are some of the risks that are associated with digital ad campaigns, but having multi-channel marketing strategies in place, and working with good marketing or advertising companies means that businesses don’t have to worry about these risks, because these companies have a lot of experience and knowledge about the best ways to prevent the negatives and provide a lot of benefits.
