If you’re not verifying your foreign advertising, you run the risk of wasting precious advertising dollars. Not even advertising giants like Google are safe from the overwhelming frequency of ad fraud.
The expansion of digital marketing has given rise to fraudsters who hijack ads for their own gain. These ad publishers will ignore your advertising requirements, automate fake clicks, and spoof domains to increase their profits while your ad goes unseen by your target audience.
The Risks Of Not Performing Ad Verification
Losing control of ads poses a huge threat to companies advertising online. The most immediate concern is the loss of return on investment (ROI), as your ad fails to generate any real traffic. This situation represents a complete waste of your advertising funds.
Hijacked ads can also damage your brand. For instance, ads may contain or be featured alongside inappropriate content or end up on garbage domains. Ad verification is the only way to ensure that your ads are reaching your target audience the way in which you intended.
When you’re running digital ads in foreign countries, your ability to verify the content and placement of your ad creative is inhibited due to geo-targeting. Therefore, if your ad has been hijacked or is being delivered in a sub-optimal manner, you might never know it because you’re restricted in using an IP from your local country.
The risks described above validate why companies need a way to test end user delivery of their ads. Businesses are turning to residential IP proxy services for the tools required to do so. Residential IP proxy services are a cost-effective and accessible way to take back control of your foreign advertising execution and verify first-hand that your advertising is generating ROI for you.
How Residential IP Proxy Services Can Help With Ad Verification
What makes residential IP proxy services so effective in verifying ad delivery in foreign countries? The answer lies in the access they provide to foreign IP addresses.
Residential IPs are those issued by internet service providers (ISPs) of any given country. They’re the internet’s equivalent of a street address and–like a street address–an IP indicates the physical location of its host.
Online services often change the content they display based on the visitor’s IP address. In the same manner that Netflix displays different content in each country, online ads may appear different depending on the host’s IP address. This is why you can’t be sure that you’re seeing ads the same way your foreign audience sees them when using your local IP.
Residential IP proxy services let you use foreign IPs in place of your own, allowing you to see your ads from the perspective of your end user.
Sadly, bad actors are smart to the methods that companies use for ad verification. They might block datacentre proxy IPs to prevent you from checking up on them. Worse yet, they might mislead you with inaccurate information–this is a risk that no company should be willing to take.
Unlike other forms of IP proxy services, residential IP proxy services offer a chance to fly in under the radar as regular traffic from the target country. They’re , as they’re indistinguishable from other visitors using residential IPs. Using a residential IP, you can verify your ads without the publisher knowing about it.
The Economics Of Using Residential IP Proxy Services
While using residential IP proxy services comes with an associated cost, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the financial impact of hijacked ads. In 2015, ad fraud lost businesses $7.4 billion–a staggering 60% of all digital display ad budgets.
On top of lost advertising spend, businesses also need to consider the complete loss of time invested when their ads fall victim to ad fraud.
You can view the additional cost of ad verification using residential IP proxy services as a form of insurance–a small additional expense on your ad campaign to guarantee your advertising budget is well spent.
For instance, let’s use the example of a digital display campaign running for a single month. We’ll use the Google AdWords cost per click (CPC) rates for the Google display network to illustrate.
The average CPC rate for the technology industry is $0.51. Let’s assume 20,000 clicks. That works out to $10,200 on ad spend. Now, if 60% of that budget were to be lost due to ad fraud (as per the aforementioned stats), this would amount to $6,120 in wasted capital.
In other industries, such as the dating services industry (average CPC of $1.49), this wastage figure would be even higher, amounting to a potential loss of $17,880 for the same 20,000 clicks.
A basic residential proxy IP service package runs at around $300. Compared to the wastage figures above, the cost of ad verification is an extremely favorable trade-off.
Verify Your Ads with Residential IP Proxy Services
If you can’t afford to throw money away, then ad verification isn’t optional. It’s the only way to ensure your advertising dollars are generating ROI. This is why residential IP proxy services are the secret weapon that advertisers are using to verify their ads in a reliable and cost-effective way.
Looking to get started? You can contact us today.
