John Koetsier, Author at Singular

Some Key Takeaways for the 2016 Mobile Growth Summit – San Francisco

This week, our team was everywhere at the Mobile Growth Summit San Francisco. And I am really glad that we were a part of it. The quality of content, attendees, and informal discussions was outstanding, and I’d like to summarize some of my key takeaways from this major event.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Games, Plus a Whole Lot More

As is typical with mobile app events, game developers and publishers appeared to be the largest segment of event attendees. Games continue to play a huge role in the app business. And indeed in its growing sophistication.

Gaming companies have been extremely aggressive in building consumer insights and business insights infrastructures within their organizations – a reflection of their tremendous marketing sophistication and interest in cultivating profitable relationships with customers. I am always impressed when we speak with a new gaming company and learn about how advanced their approaches to cultivating the richest possible customer understanding.

Gaming companies have also been among the most advanced users of the Singular platform. They aggressively pursue innovations in both UA and re-engagement, as their business goals get higher and higher. When we review the logs of our customers, gaming companies consistently spend more time in the platform, use more measures, and adopt new features more quickly than average customers in other verticals.

But gaming is only part of the app phenomenon. Based solely on my own observations, five other verticals seemed very well represented in the show audience:

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Retail

The number of pure play and multichannel retailers who are aggressively pursuing the app space continues to grow. While these companies comprise a much smaller segment of the industry than do games, their share is growing rapidly as commerce companies recognize the tremendous selling credentials of apps.
Mobile Growth Summit SF | Travel

Booking, content and companion apps were all at the show in strength. As we all know, travel has been the industry arguably most affected by the growth of digital, and the ascendency of apps is driving even more largely positive change. Apps are rapidly becoming an important sales and engagement channel, as well as an innovative means of cultivating longer and richer relationships with travelers.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Financial Services

The growth in app usage for financial activities is well documented here, here, here and in dozens of other industry studies.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | On-Demand Services

No secret that services like Uber, Ola, Spot Hero, and a host of others are growing very rapidly and boast outstanding valuations.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Media

Apps from media companies enjoy tremendous footprints and adoption. While often less aggressive than, say, games in UA, these businesses are often among the most popular apps.

Gaming is and will remain the biggest deal in apps for some time. But what’s plain here is that if you think gaming is the only game in this town, you are missing out on a big part of what makes this business so dynamic and strong.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | User Quality is a Big Deal to App Marketers

Gone are the days when app marketers were focused exclusively on cranking up the install counts. These days, as marketers are more likely to face strict ROI goals, attracting quality users is on a lot of people’s minds. That got expressed in a number of ways:

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Interest in Uninstall Attribution

Our team previewed what we are seeing in the first weeks of data from our uninstall attribution offering – specifically that three key tactics appear to be very effective at mitigating uninstalls.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Early Engagement

Lots of buzz about early engagement. Growing evidence suggests that when you get a user to engage multiple times in the first hours, days, and weeks of their life cycle, retention rates are much higher, for long periods of time.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Remarketing is Set to Explode in 2016

UA still garners the vast majority of industry media dollars, but the level of interest in remarketing and re-engagement is also very high. And it continues to grow with every passing week. Our own data show that remarketing grew more than 900% in 2015, and represents three times the amount of total category activity that it did just a few months ago.

We launched a remarketing audiences segmentation product in 2015, with the expectation that the most common use cases would be:

Basic mobile retargeting, or identifying a group of users that have not engaged or purchased in n days and delivering customized messaging to them
Cross-device retargeting, which operates under the same principles, but uses data from mobile and PC, linked by a leading device graph
Activation of users that abandon shopping carts, delivering triggered messages to get them to come back and close the deal
App cross-marketing, or encouraging the user base of one app to try another
Powering engagement vehicles for a variety of purposes, meaning using data from Singular to power customized push and other messages using your partner of choice

Based on the conversations we had with leading marketers, the biggest opportunity in the short term appears to be driving those critical early engagements and purchases which are shown to lead to long-term brand relationships.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Passion for Learning and Invention

This is a category full of marketers who thrive on change. People who are ahead of the curve as regards new strategies, marketing tactics, and uses of data. That spirit, of course, is one of the things that makes this industry so exciting and rewarding. Not to mention fast-growing.

With every conversation, we felt as though I was walking away with a new insight – and a new idea for how to help our clients drive outstanding growth in 2016.

Mobile Growth Summit SF | Final Thoughts

Mobile Growth Summit was a fantastic opportunity to go deep with the big ideas and big thinking that power this amazing industry. Thanks to the great teams at Mobile Growth Summit and Mobile Growth Fellowship. You throw a great event! And special thanks to the speakers, and the fantastic group of attendees. The folks who made this event so valuable and memorable.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Ad Fraud Tutorial Series: What is Device Hijacking?

With the tremendous costs of advertising fraud, it’s natural that advertisers are trying to learn as much as they can about how digital ad fraud is perpetrated and how to protect their businesses from its costs.

Singular wants to help. This series of tutorial blog posts is designed to provide insights and explanations into the causes of digital ad fraud and how data-driven advertisers can protect their app business from every form of digital ad fraud, including forms of ad fraud perpetrated by device emulators.

What is Device Hijacking?

We all have the assumption that what takes place on our phones is entirely under our control. We assume that we decide and are the arbiters of what is downloaded onto our devices, and what information passes from them to outside parties.

———–

Download the Singular Fraud Index

SIngular has just released its 2017 Singular Fraud Index, which reveals the mobile industry’s Most Secure Ad Networks. The Index is the first study of its kind to examine fraud data collected from multiple fraud prevention solutions, each with its own set of proprietary detection methods. Drawing on this unique dataset, the study exposes the effectiveness of today’s most common anti-fraud mechanisms as well as the 20 ad networks driving the lowest rates of fraud.

Get your free copy here.

———–

Device hijacking violates every aspect of those expectations. With device hijacking, fraudsters take control of your device and manipulate both what takes place on it and what information enters and leaves it.

How Device-Hijacking-Based Ad Fraud is Perpetrated

To gain control of your device, fraudsters have a variety of tactics — each designed to convince you to download and install a malicious app. Here are two ways that this can take place:

The app may convince the user to voluntarily download it by offering some appealing but seemingly innocuous function like a flashlight. But inside the app is malicious code.
When you download an app, a second app might secretly be downloaded with it. Again, this is usually occurring on third party app stores where attackers have more leeway to deliver apps with malware inserted. Often those apps are invisible to the user.

Naturally, the major app stores spend a great deal of time and money trying to root out any would-be malicious apps. But device hijacking is all too common.

Once a malicious app is on your device, it goes to work creating problems for app advertisers, and potentially consumers as well.

Malicious apps can do many of the bad things that drive up ad fraud costs for app publishers. For example:

They can deliver thousands of ad impressions that are unseen by the device owner/user. The bad actor CPM-based media provider thus gets paid for ad impressions that never ran.
They can ad stack so that many ads are reportedly running in an ad space even though only one is visible to the user. The media provider is thus paid for many impressions at once.
They can (with Android apps) inject false clicks and take credit for installs when other apps are installed on a device.
They can accept IAP payments for virtual goods without transferring money to the publisher.

On the consumer side, malicious apps can also create real problems, including:

They can collect and transmit personally identifiable information that can be used for other forms of ad fraud
They can collect credit card details from consumers who erroneously believe that the app was issued by a reputable company
They can use lots of battery- and processing-power unbeknownst to the user

Detecting Device Hijacking in Your App Data

Often, the key to detecting device hijacking is in pattern recognition. When a single device ID delivers large numbers of clicks, for example, it can be a sign of ad fraud. Many times, analytics companies like Singular monitor such activity behind the scenes so that they can identify or block such activity.

Device hijacking can also be used to automatically install and uninstall apps to artificially boost install counts for a bad actor media source. Lots of installs and immediate installs from a single ID can be a vivid sign here.

These are just a couple of ways that device hijacking can be detected and its consequences flagged or blocked.

How Singular Helps Protect Ap Publisher Clients from the Costs of Device Hijacking

Singular offers an industry-leading ad fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent ad fraud for our clients, read on.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements

Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Prevention Suite. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business. Click for details.

————

With Singular, app publishers have complete access to digital ad performance, media investment, and revenue data for their business. This also means that Singular has a broad sample of data from many large clients. That provides unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from digital ad fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best-known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

We constantly examine data flow into our unified analytics platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more. In addition, Singular IAPs with the appropriate app store to ensure that cash has changed hands before recording a purchase. Also, with full uninstall and user retention insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates.

Additionally, we have pioneered the use of ROI analysis as a fraud detection methodology. Measuring and optimizing to ROI can be a great way of identifying legitimate versus legitimate installs because only legitimate installs will be generating revenue.

No analytics or attribution company will reveal all of the defenses it employs to protect clients from the costs and inaccurate data resulting from ad fraud. But we’ll be happy to provide clients and prospects more insight into our approach. Contact us for more information on the Singular solution and how it can help protect your business.

Download The Singular Fraud Index to see The Industry’s Most Active Fraud Prevention Methods & The 20 Most Secure Mobile Ad Networks

Are Users Who Perform App Uninstalls Lost for Good? No! Here’s Why

Every mobile app experiences at least some app uninstalls from users. And for mobile app marketers, a high rate of uninstalls can be among the most frustrating and challenging business metrics. After all the effort to attract users, having them uninstall can feel extremely disappointing.

At Singular, one of the questions we have been asked most often when we implemented our app uninstall attribution measurement is…
Are app uninstalls lost forever?

Our research shows…absolutely not! In fact, proactive and customized remarketing initiatives can drive conversion rates that are even higher than for your other install programs – if you take a personalized approach and have the facility to specifically communicate with app uninstallers.

But first things first.

Why People Uninstall Apps

Other posts on this blog discuss the reasons why people perform app uninstalls. But a capsule summary of the reasons why people uninstall apps includes:

Unmet User Expectations: When an app fails to live up to its hype, users question its value and necessity in their lives
App Performance Issues: When operation of an app is clunky, whether because of bugs or high CPU demands, users become frustrated
Onerous User Requirements: When registration is tedious, time consuming, or otherwise challenging, people may uninstall without even getting to their first real app experiences
Better Apps Available: When users become aware of competing apps that deliver better performance or utility, you can expect a big chunk of them to abandon your app
App Experience Completed: When a user finishes an app like a game, or no longer has need for its core utility, the app is far more likely to be removed from a device.
Need to Free Up Space on the Device: When Android users reach the maximum amount of stored content for their devices, they need to remove apps in order to make room for others. This is a particularly common circumstance for users in the developing world

Since there is a broad set of reasons why people uninstall apps from an iPhone or Android device, the extent to which a particular uninstaller will be challenging to win back is going to vary.

Understanding the Reasons Why YOUR USERS Uninstall Apps

To create a strategy and action plan for app uninstalls and user win-backs, you need to first understand why people uninstalled an app from their device in the first place.

With Singular, you can define an audience of app uninstallers and work with your media or research partners to reach out to these specific anonymized individuals for their feedback.

Delivering surveys to iPhone and Android app uninstallers can provide valuable insights to help you devise an uninstall marketing action plan – one that can both reduce future uninstalls and potentially win back uninstallers.

Data-Driven Reinstall Efforts for iOS and/or Android Uninstallers

Equipped with research information, you can formulate highly targeted marketing efforts to address the app uninstalls challenges and encourage former users to reinstall.

As mentioned above, Singular offers the opportunity to define an audience of Android and/or iOS uninstallers and deliver it to your automation platform or media partners for personalized marketing messages and offers.

What Pros Say

A series of interviews we conducted with industry pros revealed that reinstall programs against recent iOS and Android app uninstallers frequently delivers conversion metrics that are well above average versus greenfield install programs.

But these folks also emphasized that in the absence of proactive remarketing programs, uninstallers don’t return to install an app in large numbers. This use case is definitely an example for which proactive marketing investment yields strong dividends.

Note: This blog post on app uninstalls was published first on the Apsalar blog, prior to Apsalar’s merger with Singular. Learn more about our united company at Singular.net.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

How Content and Content Marketing Can Help Reduce App Uninstall Rates

As brands look for more ways to measure and reduce app uninstall rates, one interesting area of uninstall marketing investment is the development and integration of quality content. App makers have long known that a richer app experience will drive more engagement, so it will come as no surprise that brands that deliver more and better content thematically tied to the core utility of an app often experience far lower uninstall rates.

Of course, good iPhone or Android app UI/UE are critical here, as we need to help guide users to the content and features that enrich an app experience.

High Quality Content as a Sales Tool

A recent article on Mobile Marketer underscored the value of high quality content for enhancing in-store experiences, which represent one of the hotter app sectors in 2016. The piece focused on the results of DMI’s rankings of mobile retail experiences. From the article:

Our research reveals that shoppers want mobile shopping tools that make in-store shopping easier, faster and more customized like their online shopping experiences. Mobile devices today are advanced enough to transform a shopper’s experience – retailers just need to harness that power and meticulously craft that experience for shoppers.

DMI found that the best mobile device apps enhanced the in-store shopping experiences with a variety of different types of tools focused on helping the customer get what they want more quickly and efficiently. Intuitively such mobile app marketing and user experience tactics should be just as valuable as elements of an effort to reduce app uninstall rates.

No surprise there. But what was most intriguing was how different retailers took such disparate approaches to delivering value via content – approaches tied to their brand equities and app utility.

Walgreens

Walgreen’s focused on a variety of features that make it easier for the shopper to get in and out. Some features that helped Walgreen’s win the top honors were location store maps that help you find specific items, clinic appointment scheduling, phone as loyalty card, and prescription reordering, among others.

Home Depot

Home Depot took a different tack in keeping with its different value prop and customer needs.“The home improvement brand’s app excels at navigating stores, comparing prices and pulling up product reviews, which are three key factors for many of its shoppers.”

Sephora

Sephora delivers lots of information to help customers choose products, from extensive libraries of customer reviews to video and photo tutorial content. These features help users get past some of the fear of trying a new product at a moderate to high price point.

While the focus of this article was on retail and in-store experience, I think it’s easy to see how these lessons are relevant to almost any app in any category:

Content Gives Them Reasons to Come Back

Just as it can drive up engagement, it can also help to reduce app uninstall rates by dint of the increased utility the app offers.

The best content is architected around the core value proposition and utility of an app. It’s not about content for content’s sake but rather about pinpointing your efforts on those features and content that will deepen the app experience and give users more reasons to return.

Content richness is relevant in those first few visits to an app because it helps set the user’s impressions about what is possible when they launch. When you can get customers to the sorts of content and experiences that are most important to them, they will likely have a much higher opinion of an application. That will surely reduce your app uninstall rates.

But leveraging “evergreen” content – things that have just as much value on visit 10 or 100 as they do on visit 2 – can also be a wonderful lever to help mitigate app uninstall rate challenges. It’s both a short-term and long-term uninstall marketing tactic.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Note: This blog post was published first on the Apsalar blog, prior to Apsalar’s merger with Singular. Learn more about our united company at Singular.net.

Mobile Ad Fraud Series: What is Ad Stacking?

Most app marketers are rightly concerned about the levels of mobile ad fraud we are seeing in the market today. This series of posts is designed to help marketers understand the many different approaches that fraudsters take in order to steal money from your brand.

They also provide advice and tips to help you protect your business from app fraud, and review some of the ways that Singular helps its clients detect and prevent app fraud.

Mobile ad fraud is every marketer’s business. And savvy, data-driven marketers know it. A recent survey of enterprise app marketers showed that almost 80% were concerned about the costs of fraud to their businesses.

This post talks about one form of mobile app fraud — ad stacking. It will then given you both practical tips on mitigating fraud risks and provide a top-line explanation on the steps that Singular takes to mitigate the risks fraudsters impose on got its clients.

Ad Stack: A Stack of Ads

Whether in-app or on the mobile web, advertisers purchase impressions with the expectation that they will be visitor to users when they are deployed. While a media company cannot really guarantee that the user will pay attention to a message, they have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that every ad impression that a brand purchases is actually seen by person on their mobile device.

———-

Download the Singular Fraud Index

Singular has just released its 2017 Singular Fraud Index, which reveals the mobile industry’s Most Secure Ad Networks. The Index is the first study of its kind to examine ad fraud data collected from multiple ad fraud prevention solutions, each with its own set of proprietary detection methods. Drawing on this unique dataset, the study exposes the effectiveness of today’s most common anti-fraud mechanisms as well as the 25 ad networks driving the lowest rates of digital advertising fraud.

Get your free copy here.

———-

We call that expectation — that an ad can be seen by a user — viewability, and it is a very hot topic in the advertising industry. Until a few years ago, most advertisers believed that the ads they paid for were actually being seen by people. But then, some rather eye-opening data were published that indicated that this was simply not the case. There were and are a variety of reasons for this, including:

Bots drive a large percentage of web traffic. Security firm Imperva estimated that more than half — 52% — of web traffic was bots.
Ad loads sometimes fail, or take to long to display before the user moves on to another web page
Many ads on a page deploy “below the fold” or outside the screen of the user
Many media companies deliberately buy inexpensive placements at the bottom of web pages in order to be the last ad impression that loads on a page, so they can get “last view credit” for subsequent conversions. Actually, the practice became so common that for a time, the most expensive ad on the page was at the bottom!

These are all “legal” reasons why an ad for an iPhone or Android app might not be viewable, provided that a media provider has not specifically promised 100% viewability. We’re not suggesting they are ethical or acceptable — clearly they aren’t. But in all cases, this advertising at least have a chance of being seen.

By contrast, ad stacking is a technique that is clearly illegitimate. In ad stacking, a series of ads are literally piled on top of one another, so that a single ad placement can register more than one ad load. When the ads are stacked, only the top ad in the stack is actually visible — the others are hidden by the top ad, even though they will register as displayed. The other impressions are billed to advertisers as if they were available to be seen, even though there is no possibility that they were.

Ad Stacking and Media Buying Models

Ad stacking is most commonly used when an advertiser pays by the impression (CPM), rather than via a buying model that guarantees performance like cost-per-install (CPI) or cost-per-click (CPC).

Protecting Yourself

Ad stacking is one of the many ways that app businesses can be affected by mobile advertising fraud. Here are a few strategies to help you detect mobile ad fraud and protect your business from the costs of mobile ad fraud.

Anti-Fraud Tools: Some attribution and analytics suites offer tools to help marketers identify and prevent fraudsters. Singular, for example, automatically offers many protections. Such tools may use signals like IP addresses, click and install pattern detection, and activity monitoring to pinpoint campaigns, partners and buying models that are driving suspicious app installs.
Common Sense: Marketers must constantly resist the temptation to sign up for media deals that sound too good to be true. A deal that sounds too good to be true is likely to result in low-quality app installs.
Focusing Resources on Trusted Partners: Most brands spend a great deal of money on installs. It makes sense, then, to focus dollars on partners that you know and trust.
Leveraging Retention and Uninstall Data: By comparing the set of user traffic attracted by different media companies, brands can learn a lot about user quality. Low user retention or high uninstall rates increasingly are seen as signals of possible fraudulent activity.
Use ROI Analytics as a Primary KPI:.When app publishers measure and optimize to ROI, you get both a true picture of the value of the users that you are driving, and a powerful way to optimize your advertising investments.

All that said, truly protecting your business and your consumers against fraud represents a major commitment of time and resources. That’s why so many companies look for attribution and analytics solutions that offer anti-fraud protections as part of their core services.

Singular and Mobile Ad Fraud

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

With Singular, app publishers have visibility into ad performance, media investment, and revenue data. That provides unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

———-

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements

Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business.

———-

Learn more about our anti-fraud offerings and our entire unified ROI analytics offerings by clicking here.

Advertising Fraud Tutorial Series: All About Device Emulators

Advertising fraud is on many marketers’ minds these days. In a 2016 survey conducted by our team and VC firm Thomvest Ventures, 78% of enterprise app marketers reported that they were concerned about the costs of ad fraud.

At Singular, we consider it our duty to help those marketers by both providing outstanding anti-fraud services and by offering succinct and actionable education on ad fraud. As the leaders in the mobile app marketing analytics industry, Singular has spent tremendous time and resources analyzing:

Ad Fraud on mobile devices
Risk points for apps and app marketing
Key ways that marketers can work to mitigate the risks

All of this research has shown that the more clients understand about the risks and costs of fraud, the better prepared they are to act.

This post is all about device emulators and how fraudsters use simulated devices to perpetrate multiple forms of ad fraud.

What are Device Emulators?

Mobile devices send distinct signals. Attribution and analytics platforms collect and interpret those signals to record user actions and traffic to determine the provenance of installs and re-engagements.

———–
Download the Singular Fraud Index

Get your free copy here.
———–

Fraudsters try to fake clicks and other marketing-related actions by creating simulated devices that send signals they hope will be interpreted as if they come from bona fide mobile devices. A simulated device associates actions with faked device advertising IDs.

Device emulators can fake ad clicks as well as first launches that are intended to be interpreted as legitimate installs. Without robust ad fraud protection, a brand will erroneously believe that a legitimate install has occurred, and may pay the fraudster for that install (with CPI-based media) or credit that install to the fraudster (with CPC or CPM media buys). In either case, the fraudster stands to garner undeserved budget from the app marketing team.

Naturally, device emulation isn’t perpetrated on a onesy twosy basis. Rather, a bad actor will array large numbers of device emulators in an attempt to secure large amounts of marketer spend.

Detecting and Preventing Emulated Device Ad Fraud

The greed of fraudsters often acts as an avenue into ad fraud detection. For example:

Device emulators might send a set of click/install/launch signals associated with a large numbers of faked IDs, then send an uninstall signal and repeat the install reporting. Too many installs rapid fire from a set of IDs is a great indicator of ad fraud.

Device emulators might send signals that they have installed an app with a fake ID, then send another set of ad click/install/launch signals with a different faked ID. Too many installs from heretofore unknown device IDs is a strong indicator that emulated devices are being used in an attempt to defraud the brand.

One faked install on an emulated device would be very difficult to detect. But fraudsters perpetrate their crimes in volume to steal large amounts of revenue. That makes the patterns much easier to spot.

There are many other ways that we at SIngular identify likely device emulators, many of which rely on pattern recognition using similar principles as above.

The Singular Approach to Mitigating the Costs and Risks of Ad Fraud

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent ad fraud for our clients, read on.

Singular believes that the best way to help clients address the ad fraud challenge is with a combination of ad fraud detection and prevention. By layering detection and prevention, brands can enjoy maximum protection with minimum time resources dedicated to the challenge.

We take a different approach than do some others in the space which focus primarily on detection. Many companies focus primarily on detection because it is easier, and puts the primary onus of protecting a business on the client. After all, it is often easier to detect fraud after it occurs than prevent it from occurring in the first place. By contrast, we focus the majority of our time and resources on prevention to simplify and streamline your anti-fraud resource investments and mitigate the need for restitution in many cases.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements
Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business.
————

Singular monitors all of the campaign and spend data into our app analytics platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, fraudulent clicks, suspicious IP addresses, faked devices, mismatches in targeting, and more. We also see all sides of a user relationship — ad metrics, spend, and post-install engagement/purchases. That helps give us and our clients a broad view into all of the key KPIs marketers use to analyze their businesses.

Further, the scale of our client footprint means that you benefit from the signals we collect and interpret across many large app businesses.. Singular’s client base of many of the largest players in gaming, retail, travel, on demand services and other verticals gives us a massive data footprint to examine so that we can stay ahead of the curve and provide unprecedented levels of protections for our valued clients.

With this extraordinary visibility into a large portion of the mobile app industry, Singular can detect and create prevention regimens with extraordinary speed and thoroughness as fraud approaches emerge and evolve.

To learn more about our comprehensive approach to fraud prevention, click here.

Download The Singular Fraud Index to see The Industry’s Most Active Fraud Prevention Methods & The 20 Most Secure Mobile Ad Networks

Mobile Ad Fraud Tutorial Series: What is Deceptive App Advertising Fraud?

Mobile ad fraud is on the mind of virtually every app marketer. While estimates vary, few dispute the assertion that app fraud costs our industry hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

To help app marketers better understand and respond to app fraud, Singular has launched a series of app fraud tutorial posts.

This post continues that series, providing information on mobile app fraud types, how they can harm your business, and how to protect yourself from specific types of app fraud. Here we also provide a topline summary of how Singular protects its clients from various forms of app fraud, and how you can learn more about the Singular fraud protection difference. Today’s post is about deceptive advertising app fraud. Deceptive app advertising refers to situations where a bad actor media partner creates and delivers a false advertising message to drive up campaign performance metrics and capture the maximum amount of brand marketing investment spending.

———–
Download the Singular Fraud Index

Get your free copy here.
———–

Savvy marketers know that the ads for their install and remarketing campaigns need to showcase the utility of their offerings, but be truthful. Deceptive app ad fraud usually occurs when a marketing team contracts with an ad network that makes its own ads in support of the marketer’s objective. Sometimes that forewarn clients that they want to make special ads for their properties that they believe will perform better than client supplied creative. Other times, they don’t provide notification to the client at all.

Deceptive App Ads and Fraud

Deceptive app ads are designed to drive higher response rates that will improve campaign metrics for a network. Some examples of deceptive app install ads include:

Ads that are deliberatively designed to mimic app UI
Messages designed to look like alerts or warnings from the user’s device
Creative executions that appear to be government warnings or messages
Advertising benefits that are not actually delivered by the app
Ads that use trickery or adult images to drive extra clicks and installs
Ads that offer rewards for installs that are never actually delivered

As you can see, many of these tactics represent both a consumer fraud and a fraud scam against the business.

While deceptive app ads can result in more of the desired consumer action, like installs, they are usually developed and fielded without a review by the client. For example, the publisher of an anti-virus app might contract with a network to drive quality installs, only to learn later that they created their own ads for the app that erroneously implied that the user’s device was already infected and that the only way to solve the problem is to download the client’s app immediately.

The Quality Problem

Deceptive app ad practices drive lower quality installs — individuals that rarely or never use them, or who never make in-app purchases. Thus, deceptive advertising fraud significantly limits a brand’s efforts at attracting and retaining profitable users. In this way, every install or user action driven by deceptive advertising represents theft to your iOS or Android app business.

Protecting Your App Business From Deceptive App Advertising Fraud

Almost every fraud strategy, including deceptive ap advertising, results in a data anomaly, like seeing far more installs from one ad network than average.Because fraudsters are greedy, they often max out their use of a fraud strategy like deceptive advertising — their actions can thus be relatively easy to stop.

That said, you have to be looking for fraud to spot it. Because most app marketing teams struggle with the amount of data that pours into their organizations each day, it can sometimes be difficult to detect fraud before it has cost your business signifciantly.

In addition to data signals, it can also be useful to monitor your customer service feedback loop and any communities where your suers congregate. You will be amazed at how quickly people will report fraudulent mobile advertising and inform your team of problems. But again, you have to be listing to hear the messages.

Some app publishers are naturally concerned that deceptive ads might put their businesses at risk of consumer backlash, ANA fines, FTC actions, lawsuits and other legal claims, or other punitive actions. Frequent violations of deceptive ad practice policies can also get brands blacklisted — something no advertiser wants to see happen to their business. One step some brands take here is to require that any media source planning to make its own ads for your app submit the messages for approval before they are released. That won’t stop fraudsters intent of perpetrating bad trade practice– but can help you mitigate the risks of a well intentioned but overzealous ad network.

Singular and Mobile Ad Fraud Fraud

Deceptive app advertising is just one of the forms of fraud that Singular monitors and works to prevent for its clients. Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements:
Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business.
————

As mentioned above, the greed of would-be fraudsters is often the best tool we have to thwart them. The more they leverage a specific tactic to steal your money, the more visible will be the patterns and performance anomalies. Since Singular collects, cleans, enhances, and associates ad performance, cost and revenue data in a single place, our platform offers enormous power as a fraud detection and prevention emchanism.

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity and fraud schemes. W constantly scrutimize client data for peculiar performance and data patterns from ad networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more.

Further, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase. With full uninstall insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates. These are just a few of the ways that Singular helps protect our clients from fraud.

Mobile Ad Fraud Detection and Mobile Ad Fraud Prevention – Why Both Matter

As more and more marketers focus time and resources on mobile ad fraud, it’s important to talk about the best mix of approaches to protect your business. Broadly, there are two different kinds of fraud actions marketers and their mobile advertising partners can take:

Fraud Detection Approaches: Fraud detection refers to technology and approaches designed to spot fraud and fraudulent activity in your data. Detection is about doing things after the fact of fraud.
Fraud Prevention Approaches: Fraud prevention refers to ways in which we stop fraud from occurring or impacting our data. Prevention is about doing things before the fact of fraud.

These two concepts entered consumer pop culture in the US over the past several months as identity theft and identity fraud companies poked fun at competitors that focused on one or another approach. Here’s an example of one such ad.

While this commercial above discounts the value of detection as part of one’s protection strategy, the reality is that both detection and prevention play a critical role in protecting an individual or a business from fraud. In the context of the app industry, both detection and prevention play critical roles in protecting your marketing investments. Let’s explore the role that each should play for you.

The Key Role of Ad Fraud Detection

App fraud can affect your business in a variety of ways:

It can rob your business of marketing investment
It reduces your revenue and ability to monetize your IP
It creates major inaccuracies in your data
It inhibits your ability to optimize based on performance

Ad fraud detection helps to mitigate some of these dangers by identifying suspect actions so that marketers see them and can follow up. By constantly examining your marketing data for anomalies, suspicious patterns, and potentially fraudulent installs, events and purchases, fraud detection helps you to identify risks to your business along with pinpointing specific results that should be questioned or disputed.

With detection, the key to being able to spot possible fraudulent activity is granular data. We learn about bad actors and fraud tactics through ad fraud detection. The challenge of fraud detection is that the advertiser learns about fraud after it has impacted your business. It’s a great discovery tool, but does nothing to protect the advertiser from fraud as it occurs.

Different advertisers have different approaches to iPhone and Android ad fraud detection. One Singular innovation, is the ability to set alerts that will notify you when data anomalies warrant your attention.

The Key Role of Ad Fraud Prevention

Enter fraud prevention. Prevention helps protect a business by blocking fraud from affecting your business, data and bottom line. Some examples of ad fraud prevention include:

Automatically blocking IP addresses known to be used by cloud computing services from submitting app install or purchase signals. Such IP addresses don’t represent mobile web traffic — ergo, we know signals from them are likely fraudulent.
Blocking fraudulent sub-publishers from claiming app installs or post-install revenue events.
Automatically flagging any traffic whose timing indicates click spamming or the like.

Marketers love prevention strategies because these stop fraud before it occurs. This is clearly preferable to having to demand refunds or other corrective action from partners. Prevention is thus great when a business is under assault from previously detected fraudsters and fraud methodologies/

That said, prevention is far less effective at protecting an advertiser from new, rare, or more advanced fraud tactics. That’s because prevention by definition presupposes that a platform has been set to spot and block actions. That requires foreknowledge. New types of signals and patterns are much harder to prevent from impacting an Android or iPhone app business.

A Symbiotic Relationship Between Detection and Prevention

When you get granular and examine detection and prevention as concepts, it’s easy to see why both play a role in a robust anti-fraud strategy. Prevention can provide a barrier against known fraudulent actors and approaches, while detection can help identify new risks while ensuring that you can take corrective action where necessary to ensure the veracity of your data and revenue figures. In turn, detection can spot new forms of fraud that can then be stopped with new prevention approaches, rules and tactics.

Singular’s Approach: Fraud Detection AND Prevention

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solution that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

Unlike some players in the attribution and analytics space, who focus on the easier and less costly detection side of anti-fraud, Singular combines detection and prevention in its antifraud offerings, with a robust emphasis on both approaches.

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, constantly evaluation all of the signals for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more.

In terms of purchase verification, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase. With full uninstall insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates. These are just a few of the ways that Singular helps protect our clients from fraud.

———–
Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements
Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business. Click for details.
————

Another key fraud advantage for Singular is the scale of its client footprint. Singular’s client base of many of the largest players in gaming, retail, travel, on demand services and other verticals gives us a massive data footprint to examine so that we can stay ahead of the curve and provide unprecedented levels of protections for our valued clients. With this extraordinary visibility into a large portion of the mobile app industry, Singular can detect and create prevention regimens with extraordinary speed and thoroughness as fraud approaches emerge and evolve.

Singular’s outstanding visibility into BOTH the ad performance and spend sides of the install category gives us unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

———–
Download the Singular Fraud Index

SIngular has just released its 2017 Singular Fraud Index, which reveals the mobile industry’s Most Secure Ad Networks. The Index is the first study of its kind to examine ad fraud data collected from multiple ad fraud prevention solutions, each with its own set of proprietary detection methods. Drawing on this unique dataset, the study exposes the effectiveness of today’s most common anti-fraud mechanisms as well as the 25 ad networks driving the lowest rates of digital advertising fraud.

Get your free copy here.
———–

Why Mobile App Uninstalls are Far More Prevalent in Developing Countries

As a mobile app attribution and data management services provider for a host of countries around the world, we see both commonalities and differences between the mobile app markets in different regions. One such difference is the frequency of uninstalls in developing versus developed economies.

Specifically, reported uninstall rates are higher in developing economies like India, China Brazil and Southeast Asia than in the EU or the US. Why? There are likely a variety of factors, including:

Phone Storage Size

The most popular phones in developing markets tend to have much smaller memories than those in developed economies. Many of the most popular phones, for example, have 1GB of memory, versus 16GB for the smallest iPhone 6. When a phone has a smaller memory, consumers must choose their apps carefully, or periodically uninstall apps they are not currently using in order to make room for other applications. They may choose to reinstall an app at a later date when the value proposition is more timely and urgent. But there are no guarantees that this will happen, which ultimately limits lifetime value. Further, it means a customer must be won over and over through marketing efforts and the Apple App Store and Google Play.

More Incentivized Mobile App Downloads

Many more app installs come via incentivized download programs in the developing world. App developers tend to use these platforms more in developing economies for different reasons, but it is clear that they have an impact. Free wifi for app download, free virtual goods for app download, and piggyback app downloads are quite common in developing markets. While some incentivized mobile app install programs attract high quality users, others drive installs with people who may ultimately have little interest in an app. Naturally, those installs are much less likely to stick.

Network Issues That Appear to Be Product Issues

In markets where data service is spotty, it’s possible that a consumer will misinterpret network issues for app product issues. In those instances, uninstalls may be driven up even though the app itself is not faulty.

Lower Percentage of Paid Apps

Owing to greater price sensitivity as well as lower incidence of credit card usage, paid app penetration in the developing world tends to be lower. Paid apps, perhaps not surprisingly, have lower uninstall rates than free apps.

Whatever the reasons, it is clear that app uninstalls tend to be higher in places like India, China and Latin America than in the US or EU. But uninstalls are an issue for a large proportion of apps across all regions, and marketers would be wise to better understand their uninstall rates, their sources of greater uninstalls, and the strategies to combat them.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Ad Fraud Tutorial Series: What is Ad Fraud?

Definition: Ad fraud is the practice of deliberately attempting to drive ad impressions that have no potential of being seen by a real person. Digital ad fraud is a crime – it is deliberate, premeditated, and designed to rob advertisers of value for their advertising spend.

Digital Ad Fraud v. Bot Impressions

Much ad fraud is driven by bots – software designed to automate repetitive tasks online. Google, for example, uses bots to examine millions of pages and apps every day to understand what content they offer. They use this data so they can deliver the best possible results with their search engines.

Google bots are obviously not malicious. They are not designed to defraud advertisers, though it is possible that a Google bot can trigger an ad impression while doing its job.

Bot-driven ad fraud is different. These bots are deliberately developed to load ad views so that the criminal entity earns advertising dollars. So, impressions delivered to bots are not necessarily ad fraud. It is the malicious intent that makes some of them fraudulent.

How Digital Ad Fraud is Perpetrated

There are a multitude of ad fraud tactics, which include:

Bots that secretly take over consumer PCs and spawn pageviews unseen by the user.
Networks of hijacked computers (“botnets”) that fake consumer traffic.
Virtual machines that mimic consumer-used PCs and rapidly spawn thousands of pageviews.
Videos that automatically play but which are extremely small or even invisible on the page.
Software that emulates multiple clicks occurring every time a consumer makes a real click.

These are just a few of the methods used. Ad fraud, and fraud detection, is a continuing arms race, with each protection breakthrough spawning an innovative approach to perpetrating fraud.

How Prevalent is Ad Fraud?

All researchers who have studied ad fraud identify it as a significant amount of total web traffic. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and online fraud detection firm, White Ops, conducted one of the largest industry studies, in which data showed that 11% of display and 23% of video impressions were caused by bots and botnets. Another leading industry association, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), stated that almost 36% of web traffic was fake.

———–

Download the Singular Fraud Index

Get your free copy here.

———–

Protecting Yourself

It is important to be vigilant as regards monitoring for signs of fraud. Here are a few strategies to help you do just that:

Anti-Fraud Tools: Some attribution and analytics suites offer tools to help advertisers identify and prevent fraud. SIngular, for example, automatically offers many protections. Such tools may use signals like IP addresses, click and install pattern detection, and fraudulent activity monitoring to pinpoint campaigns, partners and buying models that are driving fraudulent app installs.
Common Sense: A deal that sounds too good to be true is likely to result in low-quality app installs.
Focusing Resources on Trusted Partners: Large or niche vertical media companies are more likely to have the scale and resources to detect and prevent fraud. Further, properties like social networks can leverage user account information to help ensure that installs come from legitimate people.
Leveraging Retention and Uninstall Data: By comparing the set of user traffic attracted by different media companies, brands can learn a lot about user quality. Low user retention or high uninstall rates increasingly are seen as signals of possible fraudulent activity.
Use ROI Analytics as a Primary KPI:. Arguably, the best KPI to monitor and prevent fraud is ROI, or revenue divided by cost, as it is particularly difficult for fraudsters to simulate a sale, especially because most marketing analytics platforms — including Singular — verify in-app purchases with App Stores.

Singular and Ad Fraud

Singular offers an industry-leading fraud solutions that you can learn more about right here. For a capsule summary of some of the steps we take to detect and prevent fraud for our clients, read on.

At Singular, our unprecedented visibility into BOTH the ad performance and spend sides of the install category gives us unique advantages in detecting and protecting clients from fraud. Our fraud detection and fraud prevention technologies are a mix of the best known techniques today as well unique proprietary techniques only we can offer.

———–

Singular’s New Anti-Fraud Improvements

Learn about Singular’s new Enhanced Fraud Protections. See how working with Singular can help protect and defend your business. Click for details.

————

Singular monitors the flow of data into our platform, looking for signs of fraudulent activity such as illegitimate networks, IP addresses, devices, mismatches in targeting, and more. Further, Singular verifies every in-app purchase (IAP) with the appropriate app store to ensure that you recognize revenue from every reported purchase. With full uninstall insights right in the platform, Singular helps you identify sources and campaigns with suspiciously high uninstall rates. These are just a few of the ways that Singular helps protect our clients from fraud.

Singular enables data-oriented advertisers to connect, measure, and optimize siloed marketing data, giving them the most vital insights they need to drive ROI. The unified analytics platform tracks over $7 billion in digital marketing spend to revenue and lifetime value across industries including commerce, travel, gaming, entertainment and on-demand services.