By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

Advertisers have focused on minimizing their exposure to ad fraud this year and publishers are feeling the effects. It’s now more important than ever to assure your advertising partners that they’re getting their money’s worth from their ad spend, especially when bought programmatically.

So how can you ease advertiser fears and encourage them to continue to fund your journalism through strategically placed ads on your publication’s website? You do this by establishing policies that protect your publication from the typical tactics that ad fraudsters use.

1. Create (and budget for) a continuous traffic monitoring strategy – Criminals don’t take a day off and publishers must constantly be on the look out for bad actors that try to outsmart leading industry tools. You don’t want advertisers to abandon your publication because your traffic isn’t clean.


2. Pick and choose the right traffic partners – Do your homework if you’re going to pay for traffic. Ask potential partners about the process they use to monitor and protect the traffic that they’re selling from bots and other bad actors. Your vendor should have a traffic filtration system in place. Look for things like ads.txt and a TAG Payment ID system.


3. Invest in your own traffic filtration system – This is especially important if you’re buying traffic from multiple sources. You want to be able to compare and contrast your traffic partners’ results with your own metrics.

Trust from advertisers is just as important as trust from your readership. Don’t compromise it. What are you doing to protect your advertising partners from ad fraud?