Affinity.com, which is a world-wide leader in contextual ad networking with over 60 Billion impressions globally being served each month across its network has launched a new tool to protect its customers. SHIELD, which is described as, “a comprehensive, real-time traffic quality and brand safety technology to ward-off the evils of online advertising” was designed to help reduce the fraudulent traffic which has been a growing problem in the ad industry.
There have been a number of reports release (and reported on here at Performance Marketing Insider) showing the extent of fraud within the digital advertising industry. It is expected that $9.5 Billion has been lost to click-bots and other non-human traffic over the years, and that this number is growing rapidly. This is, of course, a major concern to all marketers and brands doing business or advertising online.
Over the past 18 months, Affinity’s in-house Forensics Lab has had a team of dedicated data analysis’s working on developing their new state of the art security system. They analyzed over 150 terabytes of data which passed through the Affinity network each month in order to pin-point a variety of different traffic anomalies. With this data, they are able to build in safeguards using their proprietary methodologies. In addition, their system is continuously analyzing new data coming through so they can optimize the technology as fraudulent traffic grows and changes.
SHIELD CLAIMS
In the press release from Affinity, it is claimed that this new technology will help to “identify and block fraudulent traffic sources like bot-nets, spiders, crawlers, known offenders, volume & spike anomalies and many more in real-time.” The filters used are being constantly adjusted to address the constantly evolving fraud industry.
Their “Brand Protection Firewall” is built to help protect brands from being displayed on sites which could harm their reputation. Pages which contain adult, racist, illegal, gambling, violent or other types of offensive content will not display the advertisements of brands using this new protection. This is also beneficial because these types of sites tend to have above-average amounts of fraudulent traffic.
Customers advertising through Affinity are also given advanced control of where their ads are displayed using content-exclusion categories, offensive filters and blacklisted IPs. This gives marketers additional abilities to control where and when their advertisements are displayed.
Affinity reports that their SHIELD platform will have additional features and improvements added into it over time. This technology will be in a constant state of improvement and development so they can keep up with the ever-changing world of fraudulent activity online.
It is nice to see that this ad network is taking the threat of digital fraud seriously, and is taking steps to protect marketers and brands advertising through their network. Hopefully, this will inspire other ad networks to develop similar technologies to help combat the plague of digital ad-fraud.
You can read more about the SHIELD service from Affinity HERE.
