Digital ads can be an essential marketing platform for many businesses. However, as any online platform gains popularity and starts making money, new challenges arise that marketers must face head-on. One of the most prominent obstacles is ad fraud. So, what can you do to ensure your ads work optimally? How can you avoid becoming a victim of ad fraud?
In this article, we explore how proxies can be used to support your ad verification process and help protect you against ad fraud. Keep reading to discover how tools like datacenter proxies from a reliable provider, like Smartproxy, can simplify ad authentication.
Why Is Ad Verification Essential?
Ad verification is essential for several reasons. The main one is that it helps to prevent ad fraud. In 2021, global digital ad fraud reached an estimated value of $65 billion. For perspective, this amount is equivalent to the entire annual revenue of the Walt Disney Company.
While ad fraud is usually the most concerning reason why you want to verify your ads, it’s not the only one. You also want to verify your ads to ensure that they display correctly, that the right audience sees them, that they appear in the right market, and more. This is critical because not monitoring these things can lead to skewed results when evaluating the effectiveness of your ads.
Challenges in Ad Verification
Now that we understand why ad verification is necessary let’s look at some of the challenges you face when verifying ads.
Ad Fraud
Ad fraud might be the biggest reason why you should consider verifying ads, but it also poses one of the biggest challenges. Ad fraud can be complicated to detect, especially if the ads are for your business. As the business owner, you can’t always see your ads the same way a potential client would. This makes it difficult to ensure they’re showing up where they should and working the way you intend.
Limited Global Coverage
Your location can provide another challenge to ad authentication. If you’re targeting different markets, you’ll soon discover that checking those ads becomes an obstacle in itself. That’s because your IP is directly linked to your location, making seeing content from other markets extremely difficult. This becomes even more difficult if the country you’re targeting has geo-restrictions in place. Having ads in locations that you can’t verify makes it difficult to monitor the success of those campaigns and makes them more vulnerable to ad fraud.
Ad Verification Standards
Ad verification is still a relatively limited market. While ad authentication companies are coming to the forefront, for the moment, they’re still few and far between. As such, the responsibility of verifying ads falls to the business directly. Because of this, many businesses either don’t verify their ads or expect their marketing teams to complete this task. This means that there’s no standardized process for ad verification, and the tools you get often struggle to differentiate between real and fake clicks.
How Can Proxies Support Ad Verification?
Proxies are a great tool to support your ad verification process. These proxies provide a more efficient way to monitor your online content and offer additional security to these processes.
Residential proxies are the best type to use for ad authentication as they have a unique IP assigned that comes from a real device. This makes them harder to detect, and black hatters can’t stop you from accessing the site to check your ads.
Enhances Accuracy
Proxies provide you with a more direct way to access and monitor ads. When you use a proxy, you’ll receive a new IP that’s free from your browsing biases, which could affect how the ad appears. With the new IP, you can see and interact with your ads like potential customers would. This gives you more reliable and accurate data when verifying ads and monitoring the success of marketing campaigns.
Circumvents Detection
If scammer sites detect your IP address, they can quickly hide fraudulent ads and make it seem like everything is working as it should. Alternatively, they can even block you altogether. Even if you use ad verification tools, the black hat website owner can detect and block these. However, when you use a proxy to hide your identity and IP, you can avoid being detected and get a real indication of how your ad is being displayed.
Ensure Reliable Ad Monitoring
Using a proxy with your ads is the best way to ensure your monitoring data is reliable. You can get more accurate information and access your ads in any country or market to get a full picture of your ads’ performance. You’re also not just relying on metrics provided by ad companies or website owners but can supplement them with your own data as well.
Final Thoughts
Residential or datacenter proxies are the ideal tool to use for ad verification. These powerful tools can help you monitor your ads and ensure they’re working as intended. They also make it possible for you to get a more accurate idea of the performance of your ads by monitoring different markets and locations. However, one of the biggest benefits is that they can support your efforts in eluding ad fraud.
