How can a residential IP protect your business from Ad fraud?
Businesses worldwide lose money from various fraudulent means; in the advertising industry, the most potent way of losing money is through digital advertising fraud. You shouldn’t be surprised if the global Ad fraud loss hits $100 billion by 2023.
The UK’s diverse economy, where the services sector accounts for 80% of the country’s GDP, belongs to the world’s largest ad markets, including the United States and China, and is one of the countries that record the most significant economic losses due to Ad fraud.
While many businesses focus on credit card fraud, ad fraud is a digital marketing activity contributing to losses businesses can incur annually. You need to know how Ad fraud can harm your business and how to mitigate it with residential IP.
What is Ad fraud?
Ad fraud is fraudulently inflating the views or clicks on a digital ad for financial gain. This fraud typically involves hosting ads on a website or app to generate fake traffic in several ways.
Some website owners, unscrupulous apps, and bot developers use ad fraud to fleece money from unsuspecting visitors. Ad fraudsters can use domain spoofing, click injection, or pixel stuffing to fool website visitors and maximize impressions.
You need to understand that traffic sources can be hidden, fake traffic generated, and ad fraudsters employ tactics such as impression fraud to confuse and fool advertising platforms. The essence of hiding the traffic source, fake traffic generation, embarking on impression fraud, and fooling advertising platforms is to reek large sums of money by ad fraudsters.
Ad fraud as a form of click fraud includes hidden ads or ads stacking, click farms, bot traffic, hijacking clicks or ads, and impression laundering. Incidentally, ad fraud is not technically illegal, but since it can harm your business, you can leverage residential IP to protect your website.
What is a residential IP?
A residential IP is the internet protocol (IP) address your internet service provider (ISP) assigns to your home or business when you sign up for internet service. A residential IP is generally more trustworthy than a data center IP, highly desirable, and is associated with a single owner and location.
An ISP does not control a data center IP address because it’s connected to a cloud service provider that assigns it to a data center. An ad fraudster or anyone who wants to harm your advertising business will likely use a VPN or proxy service.
Data center IPs are easier to buy and cheaper when compared with residential IPs; residential IPs have fewer users and are less likely to cause any harm to your business.
How does residential IP work and protect your business?
A residential proxy will route your internet traffic through an intermediary server. This proxy server then assigns you an alternative IP address of an actual device through which you can channel all your server’s requests.
Your search request is usually conveyed to the originating server via your residential proxy, your real IP is masked, and any attempt to trace your online activities ends at the intermediary server; websites you visit and fake ads to your website will also end on the intermediary server. The following are two ways a residential IP can protect you from ad fraud:
1. Ad verification
An ideal residential proxy must come with a package that enables you to target countries or cities with HTTPS encryption for security. For ad fraud, you can use a residential IP for ad verification and authentication, enabling you to recognize and block fake ads that fraudsters may want to display on your pages.
Apart from ad fraudsters, even your competitors may want to harm your brand; with your residential IP and ad verification, you can easily sidetrack any bobby trap the competition may set up to tarnish your brand’s reputation.
When going for a residential IP, you must endeavor to choose a residential proxy provider that is very easy to use. A reliable residential proxy provider will enable you to choose a residential IP to accurately track ads, monitor the media, and enhance content compliance.
You must focus on all the vital features of a residential IP before considering which residential proxy you need for your ad verification.
2. Web scraping
Internet marketing keeps evolving and is more than ordinary casual ads and social media posts. You must know what the competition and ad fraudsters are doing; since you can continuously rotate IPs, you can easily access your competitors’ data and information with a web scraper.
Residential proxies enable mass scraping due to the ease of rotating IPs.
Conclusion
Ad fraudsters want to short-change you; the competition wants to chase you away from the global market; a residential IP enables you to monitor and study what they are up to. You need to maximize your marketing potential and stay safe from ad fraud by harnessing the power and potential of residential proxies.
