• by Andrea Kwiatek , June 10, 2024

In programmatic buying, the allure of speed and efficiency is undeniable. Yet for marketers, ensuring programmatic data integrity is a critical challenge, with impacts resonating all the way up to the CMO.

The true culprit behind poor digital advertising campaign performance may not be your audience, creative or messaging but fraudulent data undermining your investments. To avoid bad data and flawed insights, safeguard your programmatic spending and maximize your ROI by taking these steps:

Start clean: use inclusion lists, not block lists. Beginning a campaign with only transparent variables prevents having to remove waste later. Inclusion lists allow you to quickly detect if anyone is cheating. Using exclusion “block” lists simply takes much more work and more human review with little upside and a 30+% greater chance of waste.

Cap your frequency: Optimize impressions strategically. Set frequency caps at the total campaign level, not just the daily level. A max of three impressions per day seems reasonable, but 90 over 30 days is unproductive. Strike a balance that maximizes impact without overwhelming your audience.

Choose wisely: Select the right vendor. Ask the right questions to vet vendors. Choose a vendor that reports on the largest percentage of impressions with the deepest amount of information and the highest level of concern for fraud. A vendor's transparency and thoroughness are crucial to maintaining data integrity.

Go beyond the basics: Don’t check the box. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security thinking pre-bid filters are a cure-all. The fraud landscape is in a perpetual, relentless flux, and while pre-bid is helpful, it’s no easy button.

Stay alert: Maintain vigilance against ad waste. Watch closely, early, where pixel stuffing, pop-unders, devices without a graphics processing unit (GPU), MFA sites, and other clear indicators of waste show themselves quickly. Triangulate your data constantly, scouring for patterns and adjusting your next moves to catch the biggest sources of waste and fraud before they inflict damage.

Verify deliveries: Analyze your ads thoroughly. Leverage post-bid JavaScript tags to see where your ads are delivered. Pre-bid tells you where the ad call originated, not where the ads ended up. This distinction is critical in understanding true ad performance.

Measure effectively: Tie impressions to human engagement. Go beyond these surface-level vanity metrics such as viewability and CTR to measure the outcomes that matter most. Ensure the ad quality vendor’s tag is placed on the advertiser’s website to get more complete, end-to-end measurement.

Tie impressions to human attentiveness. Did people actively engage and take further action once they arrived at the landing page? Attentiveness signals interest and has a direct line of sight to conversion goals, whether a desired behavior, a lead submission, or an ecommerce purchase.

A Commitment to Excellence

Ensuring data integrity demands an unwavering commitment to excellence. With proactive oversight throughout your campaign, you’ll steer clear of pitfalls while optimizing your programmatic performance to propel business growth.