How Does an Advertiser Buy MichaelGolf.com?

Its great to read Mike Nolet’s posts explaining the details of actual cases of fraud found in the wild. One article calls out MichaelGolf.com, a website which by his account is fraudulent.

I read the comments on this article, and thought that I could add some further explanation, as well as some raw data on how ad inventory ultimately arrives on this site.

The question that Mike asks at the bottom of the MichaelGolf.com article is:

Can we trace the $?

In order to trace the dollars, you need to have a complete audit trail of your ad impressions. If you can trace where your ad was supplied from, and who the suppliers of your suppliers are, you can get closer to holding the more nefarious parties accountable.

Here is an audit trail of one ad impression from MichaelGolf.com according to Authenticated Digital:

• MichaelGolf.com. This is the publisher, and was identified as IAB Brandsafe.
• e9d4f22caec0d9a81a13b484d33a65bd0.com. This is an unknown site in the middle of the ad stack. Many times these sites are there to serve more than one ad on a page (e.g. hidden ads). In this case, there was only one ad on this page (the audit trail would have noted if there were more than one ad), so this page could have been there to obfuscate the publisher from the buyer on the exchange.
• Appnexus. This was the exchange the supplier used to sell this ad. It is red because the supplier marketed this ad impression as imdb.com, rather than michaelgolf.com. Also, this supplier added quite a few tracking beacons on this impression, so it was flagged as well (e.g. data leakage)
• BreastEnhances.com. This is another unknown site, but from the name of the domain, this does not seem to have anything to do with golf.
• Appnexus. This was the auction where the advertiser purchased the impression (from a separate supplier). It is red because this impression was reported to come from whatcar.com.

NOTE: This partular auction happened on Appnexus, but could have happened on AdX (as in Mike’s original post), OpenX, Rubicon, or dozens of other exchanges. I am not singling out the exchange. The suppliers are the guilty parties here.

The process of rooting out companies committing fraud is a complex, multi-faceted process, and all of the major exchanges and DSPs are working on it as a priority.

What can be done now so that advertisers can buy better quality inventory?

Buy Authenticated

An authenticated ad impression is one where the information that an advertiser sees pre-bid matches the information collected post-bid. The fact that the last supplier was marketing whatcar.com rather than michaelgolf.com should mean that this impression is not worth buying.

Be Suspicious of Recycled Ads

By buying only one hop from the publisher means that there is significantly less chance that a supplier can mess with the ad impression.

Audit Your Impressions

There are many other things that the audit trail can highlight, like data leakage, hidden ads, and blacklisted suppliers in lower parts of the ad chain.

In time, it will become easier and easier to identify inventory that is low quality. he CPM of low quality inventory will eventually go to zero, and fraudsters will find another industry to focus their attention.