Today, we’d like to highlight an important but often unseen hero of Smaato’s mobile advertising marketplace—our Market Quality initiative. It ensures that Smaato’s global community of app developers, publishers, and mobile advertisers can access a clean, protected mobile advertising marketplace—safeguarded from malware, click fraud, bots and more.
Fraud is an uncomfortable topic for most of us in the mobile advertising industry. No one wants to admit the possibility of their business being undermined by fraudulent traffic, bots and inappropriate ads. Meanwhile, fraud persists, with the IAB estimating that mobile ad fraud alone is costing advertisers around $1.3 billion per year. Thankfully, there has been a concerted effort in recent years to discuss what we as an industry must do to confront it.
Smaato manages up to 300 billion ad impressions every month, reaching more than 1 billion unique mobile users. That’s a big neighborhood to protect! So how do we ensure advertisers have access to targeted, authentic audiences for their campaigns? Conversely, how do we ensure publishers aren’t harmed by disruptive, inappropriate ads that negatively affect their user base?
As part of our Market Quality initiative, Smaato has created a multi-layered approach that is built upon three pillars: people, technology and data analysis. As a result of these efforts, our global team of experts monitors Smaato’s marketplace to ensure that traffic is legitimate and ads conform to our stringent Content Guidelines. Meanwhile, we analyze fraud patterns and use third-party risk detection software to layer added protection against malware, bots, and other threats.
We have worked diligently to create a systematic, nuanced approach to fighting mobile ad fraud. In reality, we cannot completely eliminate the bad actors, and low levels of fraudulent traffic or substandard ads slip through. However, because of the trust and transparency we have built over the past decade working with 90,000+ mobile apps, we are in a unique position to identify bad actors and refine our standards and criteria. We are most thankful for your trust and partnership in helping us to improve our neighborhood as a community of buyers and sellers dedicated to the long-term sustainability of the mobile advertising industry.
To learn more about Smaato’s commitment to a clean and transparent mobile advertising marketplace, please visit the new Market Quality section of our website. Also, feel free to reach out to our Market Quality Team with your comments about how we can do better.
