Digital ad fraud costs advertisers up to $19 billion, according to eMarketer. Or as much as $42 billion, according to Juniper Research. Whichever numbers you believe, it’s clear that fraud is widespread.
It’s also clear that more and more fraud is happening on mobile, where about 40% of digital ad dollars are being spent in the U.S. Mobile app install marketing is particularly troubled. 2018 saw 113 billion app installs just on Google Play and the App Store, and that’s growing to 258 billion installs across all app stores in 2022. With huge growth — and massive potential profits — marketers are now spending more than $40 billion/year on driving mobile app installs. But fraud is eating huge amounts of that spending.
Most marketers either don’t have fraud prevention, or their existing tools lack key cutting-edge capabilities. In fact, when we apply Singular’s ground-breaking fraud prevention technology to new Singular customers, it’s not surprising to see between 80 and 90% fraud rates in some of their paid mobile app install campaigns.
Not surprisingly, given those numbers, certain ad networks are close to 100% fraud.