The Role of Comprehensive Click Protection in Campaigns

Campaigns are running, IVT protection is working on impression-based actions, and invalid clicks are being filtered. And yet your advertisers are asking about conversions, and the data doesn’t have a great answer.

One possible explanation is incentivized clicks. These are distinct from invalid clicks because they’re based on real people on real devices who clicked on the ad. They occur because something about the ad rewarded the user for the click, not because they had any real interest in the product. They’re not characterized as invalid, but they almost certainly never had any intent to buy. This could create a credibility problem for DSPs and Commerce Media Networks (CMNs) as much as it creates a performance one. 

This happens at scale in places you might not expect. HUMAN’s Satori research team found piracy sites forcing visitors to sit through ad-loaded wait screens before releasing the content they came for. The visitor isn’t there for the ad. They never were. But the click still looks “clean.”

Clicks like these pass standard validation checks because they are real humans. They look like legitimate clicks, and your bidding models have no reason to treat them any differently. The models read the clicks as real interest and optimize toward more of them, even though true interest was never present. As a result, the audience segments built from this may start skewing toward reward seekers instead of consumers. Models like these learn from whatever they’re fed. Feed them enough hollow clicks and it stops finding an advertiser’s best audiences. It just finds more of the same.

Eventually, the numbers might not add up the way you were expecting.. Engagement and volume could look fine on paper, but if performance isn’t following, the data you have on hand might not answer why. Lookalike audiences could be built on the wrong signals. Retargeting spend could be chasing people who already got what they wanted and left. Billing and optimization decisions could be made using data that doesn’t tell the full story. That’s when your conversations with advertisers might get uncomfortable. Invalid clicks are accounted for, but incentivized clicks are a different category, and without visibility into them, it could be hard to explain what went wrong, or more importantly, what to do about it.

Ad Click Defense gives DSPs and RMNs an extra layer of visibility into their clicks, surfacing invalid and incentivized activity in one place. That transparency gives clients a fuller picture of their click activity than they’ve had before, enabling more insightful data, stronger advertiser conversations, and optimization and billing decisions built on signals that actually mean something.

Click quality is a data quality problem, and data quality is what platform performance is built on.

To learn more about how Ad Click Defense can give you the visibility you need to trust your click data and the performance results that follow, request a demo today.