Black Friday — one of the biggest sales periods of the year — is right around the corner. What was once a single day in November has turned into a week-long period of huge shopping sales.
In 2021 alone, 57% of Americans shopped online, spending an estimated $8.9 billion. For digital advertisers, Black Friday kicks off the holiday season and offers huge opportunities to capitalize on above-average online spending.
Months of campaign and budget planning lead up to this event. And fraudsters are lying in wait to follow its massive money trail.
If you’re running Black Friday campaigns, be aware: ad fraud can easily derail your targets. Here, we explore the data from Black Friday 2021. It shows exactly how quickly fraudsters move to annihilate your campaigns and your budgets.
Deep-dive into ad fraud on Black Friday 2021 — and what you need to know in 2022
As the 2022 holiday season neared, Opticks analyzed how ad fraud activity affected traffic during Black Friday 2021.
What the Black Friday 2021 data shows
We tracked the data spanning from one week before Black Friday (which fell on November 26th) to one week after. The goal: identify any irregularities or anomalies throughout the period.
In the graphic below, the darker line represents ad fraud activity seen in the traffic of Opticks’ US-based clients. Evidently, there is a huge spike leading up to Black Friday, as well as on the day itself.
Why ad fraud spikes around Black Friday
Here’s what this graph represents:
- As an advertiser, you most likely invest a huge amount of your ad budget during the week of Black Friday. You are not the only one, as traffic suppliers face a peak of demand to which they cannot always answer. If they receive enough real human traffic, everyone is happy and you have invested in valid traffic. But if they lack the right supply to meet advertisers’ demand, some partners compensate. They make up for the lack of human traffic by using fraudulent sources and fake traffic.
- In other words, when good traffic drops (fewer people browsing), publishers often turn to more fraudulent sources to meet demand. This explains why fraudulent traffic increases and is much higher than valid traffic.
- On the other hand, when there’s plenty of good supply (lots of people browsing), bad traffic diminishes, though not proportionally.
Plus, our data shows that traffic returned to “normal” levels just a few days later, on Cyber Monday, November 29th, 2021. Ad fraud rates fluctuated right alongside it.
This data shows just how dangerous Black Friday can be for advertisers without an anti-ad fraud solution in place. Without one, fraudsters can attack their campaigns freely.
Secure your campaigns against seasonal scammers with proactive ad fraud prevention
Are you ready for Black Friday on November 25th, 2022? And, more importantly, are your campaigns protected against ad fraud?
Ad fraud is rife during Black Friday and beyond, making prevention solutions especially relevant during the holiday shopping season. Fraudsters expect traffic to increase — and Black Friday provides them with the perfect conditions to steal more of your ad spend.
💡You may also like: How to Combat Seasonal Ad Fraud During the Holiday Season
Why these fraud spikes go unnoticed
For example, you might notice large spikes in unusual traffic on a “normal” day. But Black Friday is a huge event that naturally sees increased traffic from expanded campaign parameters. That makes these kinds of anomalies easy to miss.
3 reasons to act before Black Friday arrives
Here are just a few reasons to implement an anti-ad fraud solution before Black Friday arrives:
- To protect your ad spend: Anti-ad fraud solutions prevent you from fraudsters siphoning off your budget by detecting and preventing tactics such as fraudulent redirects, bots, and click spamming.
- To help you reach your targets: Ad fraud negatively skews campaign statistics and data, for example, high click rates with low conversions. That can convince advertisers their campaigns aren’t working, leading them to waste resources on unnecessary adjustments.
- To protect your key KPIs: The combination of wasted ad spend, missed targets, and skewed analytics results in a hugely reduced return on investment (ROI). Our own data also shows that ad fraud can lead to an 11% reduction in return on ad spend (ROAS). It can also cause a 9% increase in customer acquisition cost (CAC).
As fraudsters continue to improve their already sophisticated tactics, robust anti-fraud solutions like Opticks become essential. They’re the only technology that can effectively protect your campaigns during Black Friday and beyond.
Get the most out of this global event. Save your campaigns from seasonal and non-seasonal scammers alike by getting in touch with Opticks today.