An advertising agency may find itself in a pretty hard position when it comes to providing customers with reliable data for future investment and campaign planning. An agency is always on the front lines and it collaborates with both advertisers and affiliates. Advertisers are searching for the most profitable (and price-attractive) channels and affiliates are looking to sell their traffic at the highest price. And when it comes to one of the most important tasks – traffic buying – an agency is always at risk since it has an obligation firstly to the advertiser by keeping them satisfied with ROMI, and secondly to the affiliate by controlling the reliability of their traffic. So present-day ad agencies are aware that the more money they save for their advertisers, the higher is the possibility to get the contract for the next ad campaign for this particular customer.

This case study is devoted to the partnership between ZorkaMobi and FraudScore in their mutual efforts to fight ad fraud.

Background

Zorka.Mobi is a Creative Mobile Performance Agency. The company has been one of the top players in the global mobile marketing industry for four years. Zorka.Mobi provides its customers with a full spectrum of mobile apps promotion activities:

  • strategy development
  • media planning
  • media buying
  • influencer marketing
  • ads buying (via DSP)
  • traffic buying (CPA, CPI)
  • publishing
  • in-store promotion
  • remarketing 
  • etc.

The agency is famous for its distinct customer centric approach and its ability to bring to life any ideas that will benefit and promote the customer’s app. GameInsight, ZeptoLab, Pandao, AlibabaGroup, Mail.ru Group, Pixonic, Plarium are some of the company names among Zorka.Mobi’s extensive list of clients. 

The Challenge

Reputation –  one of the most valuable characteristics to an ad agency. It’s vital that an agency possesses the necessary tools when it comes to traffic acquisition for an app promotion:

  • control the quality of traffic and keep the fraud at its minimum level
  • view detailed traffic data from each external partner in terms of ad fraud
  • download user-friendly and detailed statistics for 3rd party arbitrage if ad fraud is detected.

Zorka.Mobi has faced a challenge to find a highly efficient fraud detection platform that provided understandable and reliable reports for arbitrage. The solution had to provide data reports in such a form and detail that affiliates could use it as a method of evaluation for potentially fraudulent traffic cases. And, on the other hand, the solution had to be reliable and prompt so that, in case of fraud detection, the agency would have been the first to know about the issue – not the advertiser himself after the fact of losing his money to fraudsters. 

Most fraud detection solutions on the market only gave an evaluation of whether traffic was fraudulent or not without the vast opportunities to drill down into the statistics and data to understand the details. If an affiliate started to ask the question as to why his traffic has been rejected, an agency could not give a comprehensive answer in most common cases. So it typically came down to a long-lasting arbitrage which cast a negative light on all relations and led to the inevitable future breach of contracts. 

The Solution

After some research and comparisons Zorka.Mobi was referred to FraudScore. FraudScore product has been recommended as the tool that combines both highly efficient fraud fighting platform and a user-oriented reports for detected fraudulent traffic. 

According to Ekaterina Temchenko, Senior Affiliate Manager Zorka.Mobi, – by taking a  first look at the FraudScore dashboard and reports was enough to understand that such detailed, comprehensive, and vivid statistics are hard to find: 

“We had the first glance at the platform together with our tech team, they have already integrated with FraudScore and we needed to take a look at the reports. We were surprised and glad to finally find fraud detection analytics that can be understood both by marketers and tech guys. Moreover, we found that FraudScore provides us with various traffic segmentations for our own research: sub-affiliates, devices, geo-regions, user devices, mobile operators – various segmentations that are not just informative and give a complete picture of detected fraud but also gives us vast possibilities to research and drill down into data”

The traffic segmentations to drill down the fraud detection

The detailed drill down in the Offer: Fraud Score, Affiliate, Advertiser, Subs. etc.

The drill down to fraud detection for the particular offer and affiliate. Detected fraud categories.

FraudScore uses a specific approach to fraud detection – ML algorithms score each one of Zorka. Mobi’s conversion and assign it a particular fraud score – a grade that demonstrates whether the conversion is fraudulent and the probability that fraud is present. 

Four types fo fraud index – The Fraud Score

FraudScore gives a vivid and detailed explanation why this particular conversion is fraudulent – not just “a verdict” but a detailed report as to why this is fraud. 

“The way that FraudScore helps us understand the reasons for fraud detection – is a very unique approach. Zorka.Mobi is a creative mobile performance agency, we are top experts in our own field and not in fraud detection – that’s why we need a product that explains us everything about ad fraud. Then we are ready to use reports and data to arbitrage with our partners. We are able to negotiate and when a partner asks us a question – Why is this fraud and you want to reject it – we are able to give vivid, detailed and firm answers. Thanks to FraudScore, we know how to protect our point of view”     

FraudScore.Action – a specific product that Zorka.Mobi uses for CPA campaign post-analysis. The agency works with in-app ads. Zorka.Mobi’s reputation as the agency that provides clean and high quality traffic is the most important factor for in-app marketing. Advertisers are looking for the best sources for in-app ads because the prices are pretty high in this field. So it’s vital that Zorka.Mobi keeps its good reputation with the advertisers by providing clean traffic, and for the partners also by running profitable offers thus ensuring that advertisers pay on time. 

In in-app marketing, it’s vital that affiliates keep a high quality of traffic. But in reality Zorka.Mobi had faced a tricky case – affiliates sent 100% clear traffic at first, got payments and then – started to mix a share of fraudulent traffic. So for the advertisers, the situation looked disturbing – Zorka.Mobi was providing great traffic, offers were working but suddenly statistics went down contrary to the offers’ good turn out.. So Zorka.Mobi had to deal with a negative case by negotiating with the advertiser, then going to the affiliate to try and prove that his conversions were fraudulent. But thanks to FraudScore a shift has happened – the speed that FraudScore provided in fraud detection gave the necessary tools to Zorka.Mobi to resolve this case. The agency was now the first to detect the change in the quality of traffic. They had an opportunity to tackle this issue right at the moment when it occurred:

“With FraudScore we can now quickly go to the advertiser, explain that there has been a fraud trouble on our partner’s side, but we’ve tackled it and we’ve blocked this particular source and we’ll deal with it. The advertiser sees that we are a serious agency and we approve our reputation. We react to any changes in traffic quality and turn to the affiliate with detailed and reliable statistics – so we are honest with the advertiser about detected fraud, we are prompt in actions with the traffic provider. FraudScore allows us to react and take actions asap.”

A client can set a “fraud score level” on FraudScore platform:

Create particular fraud score alerts for offers, affiliate, subs etc.

This means that the system will send an automatic notification when the fraud score goes over a set score limit; and the system will also automatically reject those conversions. 

 Zorka.Mobi has integrated FraudScore to its own “Partners Portal” where all the conversions with a particular fraud score are automatically marked as “fraudulent” and a signal is sent to the advertiser or an affiliate alerting them of the status. This particular FraudScore service allows Zorka.Mobi to automatically block traffic from partners whose fraud score is higher than the anticipated rate. 

“We work with different companies and partners from around the globe and we’ve faced a lot of variations for fraud-detection reports. Usually, it’s an excel-file that shows some kind of statistics. It’s hard to trust it and to negotiate based on such reports. In FraudScore platform we’ve found various options for anti-fraud reports – pdf-files, screenshots even direct shorts links to particular report and data. That helped us to move our ability to understand and arbitrage the fraud issues to another level.”

The Case

Period: September 2018 – December 2018

Advertiser: Reactive Phone Ltd

App: Fines STSI — for STSI, traffic police

Link to the app: https://itunes.apple.com/ru/app/id407732503

GEO: Russia

Target action: the first unique payment of the fine.

Allowed traffic source: in-app

Platforms: iOS 9.0+

When working with mobile traffic, especially with in-app sources, it is very important to find a good anti-fraud system. If a client hasn’t used any anti-fraud system before contacting us, we usually recommend FraudScore. The case with Reactive Phone Ltd clearly illustrates that the quality of traffic can be improved if both the agency and the advertiser use the same anti-fraud system.

In this case, the quality of traffic was optimized by high index fraud and by CTIT. It’s important to note that fraud installs were not paid for by the advertiser. In order to improve traffic quality, we tracked it on a daily basis with the help of FraudScore and informed affiliates about the urgent need to stop the fraudulent sources. We also checked the advertiser’s reports once a week to make sure that our data matched. As a result of the hard work and careful verification of the sources for 4 months, we managed to reduce the percentage of high index fraud from 26% to 2.3%.

Reduction of high index fraud traffic (red bar), September-December, 2018

Conclusion

Summing up the case, Ekaterina Temchenko said:

“We trust FraudScore so much that we’ve integrated the solution into our own platform and Partners Portal. We are more than satisfied that FraudScore is always there to help us understand fraud issues, the team is always quick to answer, very helpful, and always open to our feedback. We are sure that we are both heading to an even greater partnership and efficient fraud fight”

Together with the development of advertising technologies and techniques – fraudsters evolve, become more tech-savvy, and sophisticated. It’s vital that agencies and advertisers are protected and armed with the technologies that are both reliable and easy-to-use on a daily basis. FraudScore is proud to be a partner of Zorka.Mobi as they continue to grow their business and expand the boundaries of creative marketing performance.