Many marketers think that fraud is just the cost of doing business. The problem is, once you let fraud through undetected, you have no way to determine the ROI of your campaign. What’s more, you may very well end up re-targeting bots instead of your real human leads.

Obviously, fraud detection is the answer, but what does it take to get it up and running – and how will it impact your annual budget?

To get started, there are two things you need to do:

1. Add the fraud detection to the landing pages you want to monitor, and
2. Create a process to get the fraud detection status.

The first part is simple. You can just add the code with your tag managed or in JavaScript by dynamically loading the detection tag with you live campaign data added on. Which one you choose depends on the size of your campaign.:

• Small campaigns receive up to 50 leads per day, and can be handled with email notifications.
• Medium campaigns (50-1000 leads a day) can alert you to the fraud status using a pixel with the fraud status as payload.
• Large campaigns with thousands of leads per day should use a live stream to convey the fraud status of your leads.

With the fraud status delivered directly to your back end, you can have fraudulent leads separated out right away. That means that bad leads won’t get followed up on by your sales team and you can report fraud to your traffic provider or affiliate in real-time.

The initial set-up cost for making that work is a one-time expense that will establish how these back-end tasks will be received so you can filter the leads by their fraud status (real or fraud) and report any fraud back to your traffic provider or affiliates in real-time. The amount of time that requires depends on the size of your organization and can be anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.

Once you’ve set up that internal process within your business, the only recurring costs are license fees, which are based on the volume of traffic you want to detect fraud in.

The most important aspect of your costs, though, are the balance of savings – if you save less than you spend, you have a net loss. But direct savings can be made immediately with the reduction of your campaign costs. Since you’ll be detecting fraud, you won’t be paying for it, saving you real money right away. Then, you have the secondary savings that you get from having clean and pure data in your systems. Since the bad leads won’t make it into your system, you won’t spend additional money retargeting those leads. Your new campaign waves will only target real human data. That means you’ll be much more effective with your future campaigns. Additional indirect savings are made with the reduced litigation risk of potential TCPA violations that occur when you contact people whose stolen identity data has been used in submitted fraudulent leads.

The bottom line is, you can make back all your set-up costs within a few months, meaning the bulk of your year will see a strong, positive ROI. From what we see, you can expect to see an ROI increase of 5 – 10% of your annual campaign budget. And, remember these are only the direct savings. The added value of clean and pure data and the reduction of litigation risk makes you ROI even better!