MUMBAI:
Sachin Uppal, CMO, Play Games24x7 which has over 20 million players, has stepped up the battle against online ad-fraud to instill transparency, efficiency, and trust to its online advertising efforts.
India today stands as the 2nd largest Internet using nation with the Indian online gaming industry to add 190 million gamers by 2021 as per the KPMG recent report. This clearly shows the change in mindset, where online games have become the way of life. And while games are aimed to provide entertainment and freedom from boredom, running India’s largest games company is a serious business.
Sachin Uppal, CMO at Play Games24x7 group, strongly believes in transparency when it comes promoting digital games via media buying and digital advertising. Taking a bold stand against invalid and fraudulent traffic generators, he stated, “I will not tolerate it. The only marketer who will not need a verification system is the one who has something to hide”.
In a typical online fraud scheme, computers are infected with malicious software that directs machines called bots to visit a web page and then click on an ad or watch a video. Not just this, sometimes the legitimate organic traffic is spoofed to look like coming from an affiliate through cookie stuffing on browsers. And sometimes App Installs are driven with fake mobile devices by constantly changing the device identifiers. This fake traffic fools a marketer into thinking that he is getting a high volume of interested users and hence ends up paying to place ads and links on the website.
Having an opaque advertising funnel where ad spends can be wasted on fake views and publishers can lose money to spoofed domains needs to stop. Digital advertising has to be open and transparent, secure and auditable with a balanced and efficient ecosystem.
Sharing the same thought, Vivek Singh, co-founder of Adby Ventures, an opportunity consulting company which specializes in Ad Fraud detection & resolution says that “In my previous avatar of being a marketer myself, I have gotten back money from such fraudulent networks and publishers. However, the priority is not to let things reach that position at the first place”.
Simply put, marketers need to be well aware of the traffic sources and have a methodology in place to check if the traffic is genuine or not. As a leading advocate in the digital advertising segment, RummyCircle aims to validate its traffic with such tools effectively by running on-going checks and surprise checks, etc.
Bot driven traffic, pixel stuffing and other tricks are outright fraud, making less than 50% of all online ads to be seen by a real human. If we don’t take a strong stand now, it is not long before the online advertising market will look like a house of cards, ready to topple.
