In order to determine the exposure to fraud related risks of our clients, Oxford BioChronometrics has analyzed tens of millions of clicks and leads generated by our North American clients in the financial services and insurance industries.

Key Findings

• Advertisers carry all the risk in case of fraud
• The total burden of fraud is smeared out over all advertisers in the ecosystem
• Networks use lagging detection technologies that make them and their clients vulnerable to the latest types of fraud
• Networks generally do not refund or give rebates for the fraud that they themselves do not (yet) acknowledge
• Lack of transparency dominates the process.

Recommendations

Marketers should not trust – or be fully dependent upon – the detection methods of large networks. They should measure the quality of traffic with a continuously updated solution that resides on their landing pages that they control. That way, they can set up agreements to get rebates or additional traffic when fraud is detected. In the case of lead generation, they should make agreements to return fraudulent leads in real-time.

When marketers mitigate the risk exposure to fraud, they eliminate direct budget waste, ensure clean campaign data, and increase the overall efficiency of their marketing spend.