One third of China’s digital advertising traffic is invalid

Back in January, Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble declared that the media supply chain was "murky at best, fraudulent at worst". By March, AdMaster’s second Anti-Fraud Advertising White Paper, covering advertising traffic data of over 1,000 advertisers in China in 2016, revealed that 30 percent of digital advertising traffic in 2016 in China was invalid.

The industry rallied last month, though, when AdMaster, together with Tencent Mobile Internet Group (MIG), announced a strategic alliance to fight fraudulent traffic in mobile marketing by establishing The Anti-Fraud Big Data Lab. The lab aims to upgrade capabilities to identify and diagnose invalid traffic and fraudulent ads during the mobile advertising evaluation process. Both parties share a common vision: to help build a healthy ecosystem for the digital marketing industry.

AdMaster’s whitepaper was designed to share objective and situational data, and it was part of a larger vision to build an accountable digital advertising market—having industry practitioners create a transparent and safe advertising environment.

As the leading advertising measurement and data analytics provider in China, AdMaster has watched over the industry as “referee” for the past ten years, and it has invested heavily to protect marketers in the interest of best advertising effectiveness.

The China-based watchdog has a track record of new and innovative anti-fraud technologies such as BlueAir, a traffic filtering module in TrackMaster, VOA, which provides verification of advertising for content-targeting buys, and SNAP, an ad verification and screen capture tool, to tackle the fraudulent situations comprehensively from a holistic angle and multiple diagnosis levels.

Vincent Yan, founder amd CEO of AdMaster, commented: “While we strive to maintain the continuous advancement of our technologies, it is critical for everyone in the ecosystem, from publishers, DSP, trading desks, ad networks to other third-party players, to work together. We need to be transparent and accountable when handling invalid traffic. And we should, together with advanced technology, follow a standardised winning practice.”

AdMaster has a reputation for reporting true advertising performance to advertisers and publishers through a unified standard across campaigns and advanced technologies—the standard also calls for reporting of invalid traffic with transparency.

In particular, AdMaster has introduced a programmatic buying solution—its pre-bid solution is anti-fraud technology implemented before advertising is served—avoiding advertising placement on invalid traffic through insight obtained from historical data.

Working to encourage the industry as a whole to collaborate, it has standing cooperative initiatives with China Media Assessment Council, such as a jointly-established measurement standards for the sustainable and prosperous development of an ecosystem.