Protect Your Ad Campaigns By Using Residential Proxies

Digital advertisements are a great way to get the news out about your business. Whether you’re launching new products, announcing a sale or drawing attention to current promotions, using digital ads effectively can increase traffic and expand your brand message to more people.

Unfortunately, ad fraud is alive and well, and these perpetrators aim to ruin all the hard work of your ad campaigns. So, how can you protect your ads?

In this article, we’ll explore how you can protect your ads from ad fraud by using residential proxies, such as those provided by Smartproxy, to verify ads. 

We’ll be looking at the following topics regarding ad verification with proxies:

• What is ad fraud?
• How to avoid ad fraud
• Using residential proxies for ad verification

What Is Ad Fraud?

Ad fraud is an umbrella term that refers to simulated traffic on an ad. This can be through clicks and impressions on ads made by fake accounts or bots.

Ultimately, it doesn’t bring the advertiser any legit traffic or sales but instead consumes their ad budget. Many fraudsters also use fraudulent ads to drive traffic to fake websites where they can trap users in other scams or inject malware onto their devices.

Ad fraud is affecting many businesses, and so far, the total cost of ad fraud for 2022 is $81 billion, and this number is expected to keep rising.

The Causes Of Ad Fraud

There are a few different causes of fraudulent ads, but we’ll cover the three most commonly used.

Click Fraud

Click fraud is the most commonly used form of ad fraud since it’s easy to commit. Fraudsters use automated bots to generate fake clicks on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. This fraud is usually committed on a large scale targeting numerous ads. 

Ad Injection

In these attacks, existing ads are replaced with fraudsters’ ads. Alternatively, these fraudsters can also inject ads into websites where there isn’t ad space assigned. In these cases, the website owners are usually unaware of this and don’t always realize the real ads aren’t working properly. 

Hidden Ads

This is a very hard form of fraudulent ad to detect. The ads aren’t visible, but they still count as impressions. By pixel stuffing, ad fraudsters inject ads that are 1×1 pixel in size (invisible to the human eye) and place this somewhere on the website. Alternatively, fraudsters can also stack ads on top of one another; only one ad is visible, but all the others still get impressions.

How To Avoid Ad Fraud

Ad fraud has a very detrimental effect on marketing campaigns. Therefore, marketers need to look for different ways to avoid fraudulent ads. A few simple ways to prevent ad fraud include:

• Building legitimate and organic website traffic
• Frequently auditing traffic sources
• Incorporating a few anti-fraud measures
• Verifying ads

Using Residential Proxies For Ad Verification

Verifying ads is one of the most effective ways of preventing ad fraud. By verifying ads, marketers check to see that their ads are displaying correctly.

To start verifying your ads, you’ll need residential proxies to hide your IP address and even change your location to verify local ads. Even ad verification companies specializing in protecting and verifying ads use large residential proxy networks.

Ad Verification Challenges That Proxies solve

Here are a few of the biggest challenges regarding ad verification and how using residential proxies can help solve them.

IP Blocks

Ad fraudsters are quick to block any IPs that seem suspicious. Using a residential proxy, you’ll receive a new IP address linked to a device to look like real users. This means they can bypass any IP blocks.

Restricted Geo-Locations

Ads are often displayed differently in other countries. If you’re accessing the internet from a specific country, you’ll only see ads for that country. This makes it difficult to verify your ad campaigns aimed at other countries. With a residential proxy, you can use IPs from the country where you want to view, monitor and verify your ad campaign.

Anonymity

When verifying ads, it’s important to be anonymous. If fraudsters know who you are (based on your IP), they can hide their actions from you or block your IP. Residential proxies provide 100% anonymity.

Benefits Of Ad Verification With Residential Proxies

Some of the benefits of using proxies for ad verification include:

• It helps maintain a good industry standard
• Preserves ad budgets
• Increases the business ROI
• Ensures natural growth of marketing audience
• Protects the brand’s image and reputation
• It can help to spot malware

Final Thoughts

Ad verification is extremely important. Many businesses rely on digital ads to communicate with their audience, gather new leads and increase sales. However, ad fraud can disrupt this entire process and negatively impact the business without realizing it. Therefore, businesses should verify ads using residential proxies to ensure they are 100% correct.