PRIMARY USE
Detect fraudulent leads and eliminate false positives for clients in paid search campaigns
IMPLEMENTATION TYPE
Anura Dashboard
THE CHALLENGE
Closed Loop prides itself on the initial lift clients experience in their paid search and paid social campaigns. Of course, keeping that rate consistent over time is just as important. Justin Lincoln, a Digital Advertising Manager with the firm, is routinely focused on driving better results for Closed Loops clients. Over the last two years, Justin has seen a dramatic increase in fraudulent or fake clicks that drove him to engage with an ad fraud filter.
While using a competitive platform, Closed Loops paid search client was still seeing a high rate of fake or fraudulent traffic on their campaigns.
We use a competitor previously…and we had good success with them initially. However, the customer service wasn’t too great and we found that it stopped fraud in the beginning…the effectiveness wore off over time…that was just a real downer for the client. It was really affecting performance. So we just… searched up other providers and found Anura.
THE SOLUTION
Justin’s client was experiencing such a high rate of fraud and fake leads that they began to consider hiring a person to comb through the leads to remove the fake ones through manual verification. Justin had a better idea; testing their incumbent ad fraud detection vendor against Anura’s solution. The difference was felt even before implementation began.
Anura has been super responsive. I know I was putting some information together to talk to my coworkers and Beth (Bickford) was able to join a meeting the next day, with very little warning, and she was super helpful…The customer service has just been amazing.
The Outcome
Justin ran the incumbent solution and Anura’s solution in tandem and, well, here’s what he had to say:
“…talking to the client, when we implemented Anura, we waited a month and measured it and they saw a 90% reduction in fake leaks. Which I thought was outstanding.”
Justin also mentions this about false positives “…because my client gets one to two super high value conversions a month…if you block one of those, they might be out $1,000,000 just for one blocked real person. So that was a super important aspect of Anura when choosing a partner.”
Anura’s expertly crafted and curated solution looks at hundreds of data points for every user interaction, within milliseconds, to ensure greater accuracy.
In addition to missing fraudulent activity, many firms lack the sophistication required to ensure real activity isn’t being flagged as fraud.
False positives are a false positive are when a legitimate interaction with a digital ad campaign—whether it’s an impression, click, form fill, or other action—is erroneously flagged as being fraudulent. Anura looks at hundreds of data points about each website visitor. Leveraging years of experience in analyzing ad fraud, Anura’s fraud detection solution is over 99.99% accurate in its ad fraud assessments.
Knowledge and Service
We have a very unique use case — only clicks — and everything runs through our traffic. We’re not buying and selling leads; we get data in milliseconds. Our goal: how do we get one of three scores back in a matter of milliseconds? Because we need to do actions based on the click. Whereas I know a lot of people that do use Anura and, obviously, they can return information and they’ve got all different signals on their platform showing you information about the traffic for those that can use it that way. We use it slightly differently, which is really just to get the signal back as quickly as possible to figure out what to do, and then we use the data on the host click in the platform as a reconciliation, as opposed to in real-time.
The True Cost of Ad Fraud
I would articulate the problem as pretty rampant. There’s a huge amount of clicks and conversions that are just fake. They range from, simple fraud attacks to extremely sophisticated attacks that waste a significant amount of spend. Anura has the technology to build audiences within your platform of people that you can exclude those from all your campaigns. There’s additional technology where if it’s tagged, it’s on your website and if the technology deems somebody fake, they can remove the conversion form, so that that fake bot or malicious person won’t even be able to submit a conversion click on your ad and waste your dollars in the first place.
THE TROUBLE WITH AI AND BOTS
The platforms are sort of navigating to this artificial intelligence based sort of management of the campaigns where there’s not a lot of input from people like me. Once those campaigns get more popular and used, I’m sure that will drive an increase in fraud. Those API’s will get those conversions, but if the platform is not smart enough to know that it’s fraud, or a fake person, it’ll be so much wasted spend.
CUSTOMER SERVICE AND RESPONSIVENESS
They were just very responsive; the previous platform was hard to get a hold of. Anura has been super responsive. With you (Anura), we did the free trial, we saw great results and it was off from there.
DO YOU RECOMMEND ANURA TO YOUR CLIENTS AND PEERS?
Absolutely. I do recommend them to my clients and also the people I work with. I used to just recommend any sort of lead fraud protection platform, previously to working with Anura, just because I knew that ad fraud was a problem. Platforms have sort of protections, especially Google, to stop a lot of that traffic, that fake traffic, but it gets through. So I definitely recommend Anura now that I’ve worked with them. They just have simply been the best.