Click fraud takes many forms and is the most common tactic of mobile ad fraud. For any given month, Kochava fraud detection flags nearly three-quarters of all click activity as fraudulent. You read that right: nearly 75% of all click activity is fraudulent. With click spoofing, specifically, rogue publishers or bad actors often hijack tracking links and repeatedly trigger the request without a real click ever taking place. Many marketers have already experienced this form of fraud when noticing that significant click volume continues to pour in, even after a campaign has ended and a partner confirms they’re no longer serving ads. As a result, frustrated marketers are left swimming in a sea of compromised data. Liftoff and Kochava have combined forces to prevent this form of click fraud through a new secure authentication protocol.
At Liftoff, engineers developed a new ad server function called Click Signing that allows each click request to be adorned with a unique data signature.
Using this new protocol, Kochava reproduces the data signature upon receipt of each click for a Liftoff campaign and determines if the click originated from Liftoff’s genuine ad servers or from a hijacked link. If click authentication succeeds, the click is logged and made eligible for attribution. If authentication fails, the click is completely blocked and discarded. This not only prevents spoofed clicks from entering reporting and muddling a marketer’s campaign performance data with false signal (ad clicks sent from media partners), it also protects media partners from having fraud indicators bogged down by bad signal originating from outside of their genuine publisher traffic.
“Partnering with Kochava on this collaborative effort is an exciting step to further strengthen our relationship with Kochava and the marketers we serve. We strive to provide our clients with clean, premium traffic, and this further protects ourselves and our clients from many forms of click fraud,” said Dennis Mink, VP Marketing, Liftoff.
Liftoff made the Top 20 ranking in the Q4 2018 Kochava Traffic Index. In the vital metric of signal clarity, which assess the integrity, reliability and breadth of the data a media partner sends to Kochava, Liftoff was among the Top 5—displaying their commitment to provide the transparent data marketers need for comprehensive analysis. Liftoff was also among the Top 5 in the app store categories of education, shopping, and sports.
“Our integrated media partners are showing more and more interest in working together to solve real problems faced by marketers. Kochava has certainly done a lot of its own work on fraud prevention, but measures like this require cooperation on both sides. This is not something we could’ve rolled out unilaterally. This type of collaboration needs to be the new norm if we’re going to continue driving real change,” commented Mark Kellogg, Sr. Director of Product Operations, Kochava.
As this new authentication protocol becomes implemented with other certified media partners, marketers will benefit from additional protection against fraudulent traffic. Earlier this year, Kochava announced enhancements to Traffic Verifier, one of which enabled marketers to set the date range of their campaigns and automatically disqualify any traffic received outside of the official campaign run. This feature is available today, even if your media partner has not yet implemented click authentication.
“It gives us great confidence to see Kochava working so closely with media partners to continually press the frontiers of fraud detection and prevention strategies. Completely eliminating spoofed clicks from the data pool will allow us to focus on the real click data that actually matters. Knowing that we’re protected enables us to put more ad spend to work and operate our campaigns at scale with efficiency,” said Justin Sampson, User Acquisition Manager, Skillz.
Ad fraud continues to plague mobile marketers, siphoning off billions of dollars of brand ad spend every year. Kochava is committed to collaborating with trusted media partners to deliver marketers the competitive edge in the ongoing struggle to detect and mitigate fraud.
If you’re a media partner and would like to integrate this new authentication protocol for your traffic, please contact integrations@kochava.com. Marketers, please contact your Client Success Manager or email support@kochava.com for more information.
Not a Kochava customer? Want to protect your ad campaigns from fraud? Click here to learn more.
About Liftoff
Liftoff is a performance-based app marketing and retargeting platform which uses post-install data to run true cost-per-action campaigns. Powered by machine learning, lookalike targeting, and dynamic ads, Liftoff campaigns are optimized to drive actions beyond the install, like booking a hotel or renewing a subscription.
