• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, July 6, 2016

Goodway Group, a managed-services programmatic media firm, on Wednesday launched an anti-fraud initiative after a review of its invalid traffic and user anomalies. Following the review, Integral Ad Science (IAS)-certified measurement showed Goodway Group campaigns’ fraud levels were at less than 1%. The industry standard fraud rate is 8.3%, according to IAS. 

Goodway Group began analyzing fraud in its supply chain in early 2016 by investigating data for 22 supply vendors that raised concerns. The firm scored the vendors by various means, including the ability to provide quality human traffic as measured through Pixalate’s Media Ratings Terminal, ability to provide impression scale, and other factors. Through this analysis, Goodway Group identified 13 exchanges with scores that raised red flags and removed them from its campaigns.

After removing the 13 supply sources, Goodway Group said it saw a 16% improvement in conversion rates, 5% improvement in viewability, and a 4% price increase for inventory.

Once it got to filtering out 70% or more of an exchange’s entire traffic flow, Goodway said it decided to eliminate the exchange altogether. Goodway found that many of the fraudulent sites bypassed traditional fraud filters and exchange-level controls.

 “Most DSPs [demand-side platforms] and programmatic providers do a good job of cleaning up what the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] defines as fraud. Goodway has now removed more than 26% of the ecosystem’s traffic from its platform even beyond what is typically defined as fraud,” Jay Friedman, COO of Goodway Group, told  Real-Time Daily via email.

On average, Friedman said that clearing prices for display, mobile, and video have gone up 50% to 100% in the past two years. But, he said, not all inventory has seen price increases. “There is still a tremendous amount of suspicious traffic available at cut-rate CPMs. If your programmatic partners are not talking to you about increased market pricing, you should be concerned about the quality of inventory in your campaigns,” he said.

“Most ad agencies are using old school tools for their media planning that offer access to metrics like reach and demographics which works for the direct [sales] side of the world, but not for programmatic, which is loaded with fraud and viewability issues,” Jalal Nasir, CEO, Pixalate, told Real-Time Daily via email. Nasir said the Goodway group analysis offered metrics that went beyond the standard ones to predict viewability and non-human traffic for the entire supply chain which includes millions of sites, placements, and thousands of media sellers that sell to media-buying agencies.