Escalated recently underscored the digital stresses and vulnerabilities that worldwide quarantines and stay-at-home orders are creating due to heavy online volume. With an unprecedented number of people now spending a large portion of their day on the internet, web publishers are experiencing a flood of invalid traffic (IVT), increasing the risk not only to their own business, but also to revenue generated by their advertising partners. Escalated is a trusted provider of real-time ad-fraud protection, geared toward IVT, bots and a wide variety of other malign digital activity.

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“As people and businesses adjust to the new normal, internet traffic has swiftly increased to unprecedented levels,” said Escalated CEO, Kyle Smith. “While this would normally be seen as a boon to website publishers of all types, especially for ad revenue purposes, what we’re discovering is that it has also left many companies scurrying to protect themselves from a heavy influx of IVT, which left unchecked can have damaging effects on both a publisher’s client and advertiser relationships.”

The Problem With Increased Web Traffic

Due to an imbalance in supply and demand, an impression in a typical header bidding setup could be sent to multiple partners only to be bid on by the exact same buyer. That buyer is now finding a new heightened need to scrutinize all incoming requests. Further, IVT creates fraudulent ad impressions, steals advertising revenue, causes abnormalities, and ultimately harms partner and client relationships. DSPs, as a result and cumulative net effect of stressed infrastructure costs, are calling for increased efforts in shedding total QPS.

Of the overall threat, Smith said, “The issues arising from increased web traffic comes at a time when the ad tech industry has been derailed by plummeting CPMs. The time has never been more important for publishers to actively monitor and block out IVT to reduce total market friction while maintaining reputational status.”

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Escalated: The Solution

Escalated’s IVT prevention and monitoring solution eliminates bots on the fly, minimizes risk, and can be used to make bidding or rendering decisions. The post-bid monitor tags also allow collection of insights into overall traffic activity, spotting IVT as it is received by domain, referrer, or partner source. Other features of Escalated’s solutions include:

• Comprehensive Ad Fraud Protection: Stops bots and other invalid traffic from viewing or clicking on ads, following links to clients’ landing pages, and ruining campaign results. Detects hard-to-find, incoming, or deliberately hidden fraudulent activity, keeps digital content safe from theft.
• Audience Management: Eliminates bots that pretend to be human audience members, allowing for pure and accurate data collection.
• Campaign Optimization: Bots can confuse analytics, offset KPIs and decimate marketing budgets. Escalated tracks IVT by domain, partner, source, or geo tag. Clients can also send in costing data to track IVT by overall cost, enabling the creation of whitelists and blacklists.
• Resource Protection: Save server resources by denying fraudulent activity. Protect servers from load issues and other complications.
• Ad Verification: Audited campaigns ensure ads are running exactly where and when they are supposed to, promoting maximum effectiveness and use of advertising revenue.
• Instant Protection: Setup and ease-of-mind within just minutes.

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