Case Study

Launch Potato Partners With Anura to Drive More Accurate Results

PRIMARY USE

Learn how Anura helped Launch Potato protect clients from fraud that is pervasive in their promotions, in the gaming and sweepstakes verticals.

IMPLEMENTATION TYPE

API Integration

Scoring Tool Integration

THE CHALLENGE

Launch Potato knows the dangers of online ad fraud. The digital media company understands that with millions of ad impressions, there are bound to be some that are perpetrated by bad actors looking to drive fraudulent activity. Launch Potato is responsible for managing their clients’ ad budgets and ensuring that they are maximizing the value of their campaigns, so they use a mix of technologies to help mitigate ad fraud, depending on the type of campaign they are running. One area of particular concern is their prizes and games verticals, which encourages consumer interaction and contact submissions to generate engagement and interest in a product or brand. These campaigns can lead to higher-than-average bot or fraud attacks. Launch Potato needed a solution more precise than what their existing providers or methods offered, while also enabling them to discern various types of fraud and eradicate false positives, which can adversely affect campaign economics.

THE SOLUTION

Adam Schwartz, SVP of Performance at Launch Potato, was concerned about the firm’s ability to produce quality leads from their campaigns and maintain positive ROI for their clients. The prizes and games segment of their business is particularly sensitive to intrusion from fraud. Layering Anura’s solution in the mix has allowed them to acquire more legitimate traffic with a higher degree of confidence while also ensuring they are not losing leads to false positives. “We’re compensated on performance based actions, which require us to be able to buy media and more media. Anura has allowed us the opportunity to go buy more media and to figure out that top of the funnel piece in a more effective manner to drive downstream conversions.”

THE Outcome

Launch Potato regularly receives and reviews signals from inbound traffic for their prizes and games verticals. With Anura’s filter in place, they can confidently assess and filter traffic in milli-seconds. Anura’s thoroughness ensures that real consumers have positive experiences, while eliminating the fraudulent clicks that can harm a brands reputation.

Accuracy Matters

Identifying both real and fake leads as accurately as possible is paramount. The integration of Anura into their tech stack has allowed Launch Potato to identify fraud and then decide how to manage it. “When you’re working with Google and other ads… we can work with returns, and returns are sometimes easy to quantify unless it’s very, very large quantities. You don’t want to deal with a handful of leads, a handful of clicks, that’s easy to take back. Google doesn’t give you that, so putting (Anura) in front of something like that…could mean the difference of your account (being successful) or not.”

FEATURES OF ANURA
There are two aspects we like about Anura. A dashboard is a nicety, and is great for companies that don’t understand data, but we pretty much consume everything from their API and ingest it on our end. We look at the raw data and build our own dashboards. Having access to raw data is incredibly important with any of our vendor relationships. That’s the differentiation from our perspective. The second aspect we like is the redirect feature. The ability to use it inside of tag manager was part of what I was looking for in a solution.

MATERIAL REDUCTION IN FRAUD
Even though we didn’t have a lot of fraud, Anura’s Solution give us more peace of mind. It effectively enabled us to go after additional types of media that we might not have gone after before. I think historically we’ve always been a company that prides ourselves on where and what we buy. Anura has effectively enabled us to take on a little bit more risk while also being able to buy it effectively.

THE TROUBLE WITH AD FRAUD
Ad fraud is persistent in places that have lower value, lower intent, or sometimes questionable opportunities. We don’t want to be associated with that, so if we call it out, it effectively means that we’re trying to buy that medium more than something else. Our business is predicated on tier-one programmatic exchanges and mostly that. I do see Anura’s product helping more with publisher relationships because we don’t always know where the publisher itself is buying media.

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND RESPONSIVENESS
Anura has a great team. They are proactive in reaching out, making sure that the product is working, and that it’s meeting our needs. I’m always appreciative of those things and they’ve certainly been a pleasure to work with.

DO YOU RECOMMEND ANURA TO YOUR CLIENTS AND PEERS?
Yes, Anura has been a really good solution for us. Ad fraud solutions are not something I would just arbitrarily say a business needs, because if you don’t understand or see the problem at hand, it’s not going to be value additive to your business. But once you reach that scale, you should be researching and looking at solutions. Using something like Anura does become added value, and you can see the impact of it!