Mobile AR Continues To Climb; Presents Challenge For Marketers To Integrate Into Existing Tech

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Mobile augmented reality is expected to earn $1.5 billion this year, outselling virtual reality games and creating opportunities for creative marketing. According to second quarter 2018 data released by SuperData Research, virtual reality continues to lag behind but Oculus Go sales look promising.

Pokémon GO, the game that kicked off an AR mobile movement in 2016, reached its highest monthly player count since 2016, SuperData noted. The world is still waiting for a new “killer app,” however, and developers are competing to make it. Apps using Apple’s AR platform, ARKit, grew 13 percent quarter-over-quarter, while monthly active users declined 11 percent.

AR has created a number of creative opportunities for brands, too. Social media platforms like Facebook and Snapchat have incorporated branded AR campaigns into their mobile apps. Facebook recently began testing AR ads that let users try on products like sunglasses and makeup, for example.

“AR is one of the most talked-about technologies, so branded AR experiences like IKEA Place have the potential to generate major buzz,” SuperData research principal analyst Carter Rogers said in a statement. “However, as the novelty wears off, consumers will be less willing to make the effort to download standalone branded apps.”

The key to continued engagement, Rogers said, will come by way of seamlessly integrated AR into existing sites and platforms.

Console gamers are still waiting for VR to take off, and so are developers, apparently. Sony’s PSVR had a lackluster VR showing during E3 and sold just 100,000 units in the second quarter, compared to three times as much during the same time last year. Microsoft, meanwhile, abandoned bringing VR to the Xbox One X entirely.

“Big developers either aren’t sold on the technology or don’t believe that investing time and resources in console VR content is worth the hassle… yet,” Superdata notes.

Facebook is taking advantage of the lack of competition, selling 289,000 Oculus Go headsets in the second quarter.

“Oculus GO is part of an important movement for XR [cross-reality],” SuperData Research’s head of XR Stephanie Llamas said in a statement. “Facebook sold more units of the standalone headset in its launch quarter than they did the Oculus Rift in the entire first half of 2017. Its price and convenience are proving to be selling points, but it will be up to them to create compelling content that keeps users engaged over and over again.”

SuperData predicts that the immersive technology market—which includes VR, mobile AR, Mixed and Augmented Reality headsets and 360 cameras—will reach $7.7 billion in 2018 and $30 billion by the year 2020.

Programmatic Explained: In-House, Transparency Trending In 2018

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Spending on programmatic advertising is more substantial than it’s ever been. An April report from eMarketer shows that $46 billion will be spent on programmatic advertising this year, meaning that 82.5 percent of digital display ads in the US will be purchased through automated channels. Additionally, the study forecasts that mobile programmatic spending will reach $32.78 billion in 2018, making up 70.4 percent of all programmatic digital display outlays in the US.

Mobile Platforms Growing Fast

The total global advertising spend on mobile is expected to come close to $185 billion by the end of the year, which will lead many advertisers to optimize interactive campaigns for smartphone and tablet devices to attract the attention of users while they’re on the move. Consumers spend about 80 percent of their mobile device time using apps, according to findings from eMarketer, so it’s likely that there will be a marked shift from mobile web to in-app ads sooner rather than later.

A recent PubMatic study found that “mobile private marketplaces monetized impression volume increased by 37 percent year-over-year in Q4 2017,” which continues a growth streak that has been going on for eight consecutive quarters. PubMatic attributes this trend to marketers who are spending more on programmatic advertising while seeking premium, brand-safe spaces at the same time.

The Transparency Problem

Although the Google/Facebook duopoly will likely continue to dominate the industry, players such as Amazon may become major challengers. Additionally, smaller self-serve platforms could grow to compete with them. According to eMarketer’s forecasts, of the nearly $19 billion in additional ad dollars that will be spent on programmatic display space between 2018 and 2020, the majority will go to private setups including private marketplaces and programmatic direct transactions as buyers become increasingly wary of “the open markets’ transparency and quality issues.”

Transparency in programmatic advertising has been a key issue throughout 2017-18, with brands requesting higher levels of safety, visibility and transparency from their ad sources. A study conducted by Truth found that 79 percent of marketers have transparency concerns while 14 percent reportedly didn’t have any such concerns. This indicates that the majority of marketers are looking for “a cleaner supply chain” to help them save time and money.

On the plus side, selling counterfeit inventory is becoming increasingly difficult due to technologies such as blockchain and ads.txt, which enable publishers to publically declare what sellers are authorized to sell from their inventory. At the same time, marketers are becoming more aware of the effectiveness of their programmatic campaigns and the audience that has viewed them—even with GDPR in effect—leading to a greater level of granularity for highly-targeted automated ads.

Bringing Programmatic Tech In-House

More advertisers are developing their own programmatic ad buying solutions to guarantee brand safety and quality. Research from ExchangeWire and IPONWEB, which surveyed 129 professionals from around the world working in programmatic media, shows that 49 percent of all advertising agencies undertake programmatic media buying using their own technology. Thirty-four percent report combining their own technology with that from a third-party while 17 percent rely exclusively on third-party offerings. The report also indicates that agencies in EMEA lead the way with self-reliance, with 58 percent stating that they only use their own technology. In comparison, 56 percent of North American agencies and 33 percent of APAC agencies surveyed said the same.

ANA’s whitepaper from late 2017, The State of Programmatic Media Buying, reports that 85 percent of the 149 members surveyed are currently conducting programmatic initiatives. Of them, 78 percent said that they were either concerned or very concerned about brand saftey issues in programmatic buying. Only 40 percent felt comfortable with the transparency they currently receive, and perhaps as a result, 35 percent of respondents have reduced their use of external agencies in favor of expanding their in-house capabilities for programmatic buying.

Marketing Science: How To Source Action, Not Just Data

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Written by Chris Younger

Modern marketing is about applying creative decisions to logical data. The promise of the next campaign-changing piece of consumer intelligence has engineers fishing in an ocean of noise and media teams clamoring for their next meal. Even if discovered, understanding how to formulate those decisions and identify which data to act upon is an incredible challenge. Approaching marketing as a science has long been the market’s potential solution.

Marketing science, as expected, takes a scientific approach to marketing. Data architects and psychologists work together to map social speech against interest, reverse engineer location patterns to decipher passions, and follow crumbs of browser history to identify purchase intentions.

The practice exists at the intersection of human-powered strategic marketing and tech-powered data analytics. By combining the human and the machine, brands have the ability to build more intuitive customer journeys, identify and reach segmented audiences, and deliver personalized content.  

While various options offering slightly differentiated solutions currently dominate the market, here’s how marketing science enables brands to better understand their audiences and produce measurable outcomes.

Finding Signals, Not Noise

Strategists are finding actionable takeaways through marketing science. No longer burdened with “let’s give this a shot” attempts, marketers will eventually be able to reduce uncertainty to nearly zero.

Marketing science platforms like that of a.network’s Soulmates.AI, are built to explore the signals in social speech, such as personality traits, passions, aversions and preferences. It then uses those signals to uniquely engage each personality, celebrate what audiences love and avoid certain users because they just don’t care for you. These signals allow brands to use their budgets more effectively and build more personalized messaging for each consumer.

It combines the best of technology, analytics and marketing under one umbrella. After all, machines still can’t match human intuition, but humans can’t compute large data quantities. By bringing these disciplines together, marketing science empowers brands to discover unprecedented connections and predictive insights about their audiences.

Quality Insights Demand Investment

Marketing science isn’t an experiment that ad agencies and brands can explore for a one-off video or social ad. It requires a major investment in time and money and a top-down commitment throughout the organization.

Brands and social media creators typically keep their feeds public and that makes it easy for AI systems to offer predictive insights based on both the raw data on their profile and analysis of that information and their content. Working with a marketing science team, brands and their creator partners can provide additional follower details that help round out the picture of their audience to allow for profiling, targeting and audience segmentation.

It’s also important to note that marketing science is often powered by purpose-built technology created specifically to understand the nuances of social speech, marketing trends, consumer behaviors and interests. It stands apart from other AI systems that take a more general approach to gathering and understanding data by excelling at deciphering social conversation.

Yes, the investment is substantial, but the results will transform the way you approach marketing—for the better.

Marketing Science In Action

For a brief example, consider a blind case study involving our firm, the Ayzenberg Group, and a major gaming brand. Ahead of a major product launch, the brand needed to better understand its core audience.

Using marketing science, the agency ran a custom research study which, in an effort to divide their audience by motivations, used artificial intelligence to ‘read’ social speech. After all, psychometricians have long regarded expressed speech, be it in-person or writing, as a key identifier of personality and passions. By evaluating that speech, Ayzenberg was able to understand why these people were gamers: Did they want to compete, make friends, or just recreate? Once the system read and analyzed social media posts to understand conversations, topics or even declarations, it identified those motivators and gauged how each audience segment spent time on the gaming console. After various cycles of input, analysis and filtering, the agency pinpointed which consumers were most likely to respond to sales efforts based on their behaviors.

Once we had our findings, we redesigned the brand’s communications and media strategy for the upcoming year. The product launch campaign was adjusted to prioritize one key audience segment and resulted in a 300 percent sales increase in the proceeding first quarter alone.

The process amounted to textbook AI put into action: We input data, made decisions about that data, and then used those decisions to inform our next strategy, all of which converted sales.

What It Really Takes

It has become increasingly important for brands to have a partner that can cut through all of the social noise while still keeping analytics and the art of strategy intact.

Agencies that are optimally suited to be that partner, with years and millions of dollars invested in artificial intelligence technology, will lead marketing science and redefine how audiences are engaged and motivated. By integrating the social and data sciences, scientists and engineers can build the best possible relationships between brands and audiences. The result is a modern, results-driven system that is custom-made to discover new human insights and truths.

The business of now will use analytics to build insights and strategies, applying data to the art of storytelling. There’s no question that an abundance of data exists and marketers have long sought to apply the promise of science to the potential of creativity. What’s important now is applying the tools of today to make sense of that data, leverage the insights it brings and act upon those signals in order to motivate behaviors in a way that’s genuinely helpful.

Guess And Alibaba Use Artificial Intelligence To Reinvent Retail Fashion

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Global lifestyle brand Guess announced a new project with longtime partner Alibaba Group to bring fashion and technology together using artificial intelligence. At the same time, customers are provided with richer experiences that “combine both online and offline shopping behaviors.”

On July 4, the two companies jointly launched a pilot concept shop on the Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus coinciding with the 2018 Fashion and Textile Conference, to envision the future of fashion retail. Driven by Alibaba’s FashionAI project, which combines computer vision with human fashion expertise, the FashionAI concept store features smart racks, smart mirrors and next-generation fitting rooms.

Shoppers logged into the store using a mobile app, with the option to have their faces scanned for a more personalized experience. They were then free to browse the store, and a nearby mirror would show related information whenever they took an item off the rack. Customers could use the touch interface to interact with the mirror to see different colors along with personalized mix-and-match options and accessories to complete the look, along with where they could find the items in the store.

Additionally, shoppers don’t have to lug around a pile of clothing. They can use the smart mirror to add items to their cart, and store employees will have their picks ready for them to try on when they go to the fitting rooms. There, they can interact with additional smart mirrors and the FashionAI to further adjust or customize their look, while the staff is alerted to changes in real-time. The clothes they try in the store will show up on their mobile apps, which will offer further mix-and-match options from Alibaba’s ecommerce sites, Taobao and Tmall.

In a related press release, Guess Inc. said, “Besides the FashionAI concept store’s futuristic appeal, the project was aimed at providing a better retail experience for shoppers and to help brands better use analytics in ordering and maintaining inventory.”

Although fully automated, unmanned stores already exist in China, they’re mainly convenience stores. Fashion is a completely different beast. An outfit that’s perfect for one person might not be to someone else’s taste, which is why this was a major test for the artificial intelligence. Other practical issues include whether the store can be scaled for better speed, since each smart mirror can only attend to one user at a time.

The concept store provides a glimpse into a future where online and offline shopping could come together, facilitated by artificial intelligence. It also marks a new step in a partnership that has lasted over five years, with Guess confirming that the Alipay app will be supported in 41 US stores by the end of the month. Guess has not provided a termination date for the pop-up experience, and even though the company hopes to open a second location in the future, there currently aren’t any plans for one.

“As technology changes how we interact, it also affects how we shop. As our customers evolve, it is critical that we evolve with them,” said Guess CEO Victor Herrero in a statement. “Our strong and long-lasting partnership with global technology leader Alibaba puts us ahead of the market in our industry. Together, we are able to innovate in real time. This is the future of retail and we plan to continuously invest and adapt to our customers’ needs in this changing retail landscape.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uccIK78flx4

 

The Evolution Of Brand Trust Measurement

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Earlier this year, Starbucks went through a major brand trust crisis. When a Philadelphia Starbucks manager called the police on two African-American men waiting for a business meeting, leading to a chain reaction of arrests and protests, it had big consequences. Starbucks overhauled their store rules in reaction to the manager’s actions, differences in patron treatment at the chain’s many locations came to light, and customers lost faith in the brand.

The buying public lost faith in the trust of the brand to do it’s intended service, successfully. In an unambiguous sense, this is the definition of brand trust. But, finding a metric or measurement to accurately convey trust in a brand is an inexact science and one that still relies much on direct customer feedback.

According to YouGov, a polling organization, Starbucks’ workplace reputation and purchase consideration scores dropped substantially. Purchase consideration scores, which measure customer intent to make a purchase, dropped from 28 percent in April to 24 percent at the end of May. The brand’s workplace reputation—that is, its reputation as a good place to work—dropped from 17 percent to approximately 4 percent.

Metrics such as YouGov’s are one of the many ways brand trust is measured. Pollsters like YouGov quantify trust, prejudices and shopping habits the public has with particular brands. Brand trust can also be measured by analyzing social media content, by tracking consumer habits, and through internal organizational tracking.

Brand Trust & PR Crises

For instance, United Airlines went through a perfect storm of brand trust crises over the past five years. Their merger with Continental Airlines led to employee strife, labor union difficulties and consumer dissatisfaction; a series of well-documented PR nightmares such as the dragging of an overbooked passenger off a plane led to declining brand trust among customers.

United uses both internal metrics like customer surveys and external metrics—like brand-related conversations on social media—to understand brand trust. Overtures to United employees, customers, and the general public are also helping to improve, or at least stabilize the airline’s brand perceptions. In 2016, United ranked fifth among traditional carriers on the J.D. Power North American Airline Satisfaction Survey; the brand still ranks #5 in J.D. Power’s 2018 survey—but sometimes, stabilizing brand trust is just as important as increasing it.

Because brand trust is the closest thing to a quantitative methodology for understanding how people feel about a brand, brand trust, well… matters. When organizations rank particularly poorly for brand trust, it’s a sign they need to take drastic steps to rebuild that relationship. Two examples of that are Domino’s Pizza’s public 2009 admission that they were neglecting taste in their product following years of losing market share to competitors, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s public letter in 2014 that repudiated much of the company’s prior strategy and promised to change their internal working culture.

Understanding Brand Trust

Certain brands have done particularly great jobs of encouraging brand trust: Amazon’s customer-friendly policies encourage brand trust despite their often cutthroat business practices, supermarket chains like Trader Joe’s and Wegman’s encourage active customer fan bases, and luxury automakers such as Tesla and Maserati court customers and turn their cars into markers of identity.

The methods of understanding brand trust are relatively similar across companies and organizations. Surveys of customers, vendors, employees, or the public can gauge various measures of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Externally, brands (or their agencies) can mine social media posts, emoji usage or online reviews to quickly gain insight into how they are perceived.

Brand trust isn’t a new concept at all; brands have been conducting market research and surveys for decades to understand how they are perceived. However, interest in brand trust metrics spiked in the 2010s when easy analysis of social media posts and quick email-based polling became easier.

Brand Trust and External Perceptions

Many brands exist in a sealed, relatively hermetic world. Inside organizations, of course, employees often drink the internal Kool-Aid and have an artificially rosy view of their company and product. This is why it’s so important to look to the outside in order to understand brand trust.

There are a variety of different quantitative and qualitative methods for determining brand trust—brands can rely on external vendors, crunch numbers internally, or find the right mix of the two for their organization. Using sentiment analysis APIs on social media data, for instance, or tracking hits and classifying them on Google News can go a long way towards understanding brand sentiment.

Brand trust metrics, however, aren’t perfect. Sending customers email surveys only attracts answers from a subset of respondents with enough time or interest in completing a full survey and social media only offers an incomplete picture. Happy customers are far less likely to post positive reviews on Yelp or Amazon than unhappy customers, and negative mentions of brands on Twitter largely outnumber positive ones. With that said, brand trust at least offers a window into how brands are perceived—and that’s better than nothing.

Ready to review the full report on the a.BTI Retail Report? Click here for the free download.

Google Reveals New Consolidated Ad Platforms Focused On Privacy

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Google has unveiled a new, consolidated marketplace for digital advertisers that focus on consumer privacy, marketing insights and tools to help small businesses.

Three main pillars—Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager are scheduled to roll out next month. The company will reveal more information about its new products during a live stream on July 10.

This news marks the end of an era as infamous brand names like AdWords and DoubleClick are retired and merged into a one-stop advertising destination. Privacy, Google said, is the company’s top priority when offering these marketing tools.

“Consumers are also more aware of how they’re being marketed to and how their data is being used—and they want more control,” Brad Bender, vice president of display and video advertising said in a blog post.

Google has been vocal about its plans to comply with GDPR, including new privacy policies and user controls but still managed to get sued on the first day of GDPR enforcement. Despite mounting pressure from consumers and advertisers alike, Google claims that its consolidated marketing offerings have been in the works for a while.

“The decision to evolve the names was not related to exogenous factors […] as we have been actively working to evolve the brands,” Dan Taylor, managing director of global display and programmatic at Google said in a press conference.

As part of the rebranding, DoubleClick Search will be renamed Search Ads 360. Display and Video 360 Search Ads 360 will combine display ad products from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center.

Google’s advertising tools have largely been aimed at large businesses, but the company made a dedicated microsite for small businesses, too. An option in Google Ads called Smart Campaigns will let companies use a form to create an ad then set goals like website traffic or phone calls.

“This is just the beginning of the next chapter in our platforms story, said Google. “We’re committed to building solutions that help you achieve your marketing goals while meeting consumers’ high expectations for privacy, transparency and control.”

MWC Shanghai 2018 Focuses On Tech and Marketing Trends Impacting Mobile

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The annual GSMA Mobile World Congress Shanghai is set to kick off this week from June 27-29 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre. Executives from around the world will convene to discuss technological and marketing trends that are shaping the mobile space.

This year’s event will include more than 600 participating companies and it is expected to attract over 60,000 attendees. Keynote speakers include AT&T Business CEO Thaddeus Arroyo, Viacom International Media Networks president & CEO David Lynn, and Sunil Bharti Mittal, the founder and chairman of The GSMA. New speakers include Dentsu Aegis Network China CEO Susana Tsui and China Mobile chairman Shang Bing.

“We’ve expanded the number of programs and events at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, featuring everything from sports and fitness to service robots to the intersection of art and innovation, and beyond,” GSMA chief marketing officer Michael O’Hara said in a statement.

In addition to a showcase of service robots, Internet of Things (IoT) joins artificial intelligence and 5G data connections as one of the main themes of the event, as we live in an ever-more connected world. GSMA Intelligence released a report in May stating that the global IoT market will be worth $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 as the market value shifts from connectivity to platforms, applications and services. Additionally, the number of global IoT connections via both cellular and non-cellular will reach 25.2 billion by 2025.

Advertisers may be especially interested in the Marketing Excellence Summit, which takes place on June 28, and addresses the telecom industry’s problem with creativity when it comes to marketing and advertising. Panels include Innovation and Technology to Marketing and Marketing in the Mobile Age, the latter includes speakers Josh Ong, director of global brand strategy & communications at Cheetah Mobile and Amanda Woolverton, CMO of Ericsson Asia. Panels will discuss cost-efficient ways companies can continually engage with customers at every touchpoint by increasing campaign frequency, engagement and distributing promotions across multiple digital channels and measuring marketing performances.

Additionally, the Women4Tech Summit is debuting at this year’s Shanghai conference, following its successful launch at MWC 2017 in Barcelona. Senior level speakers and panelists will discuss ways to ensure gender equality in mainstream work environments while sharing advice for broadening gender diversity. The GSMA developed the Women4Tech program to “address gender diversity in the mobile industry,” designed to increase female leadership in the digital age to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Activities will include speed coaching and networking sessions, special tours and more.

Mobile World Congress Shanghai will also feature a range of partner programs developed by leaders from across the mobile ecosystem. They include The 42nd Asia Pacific Mobile Operators Conference, the GTI Summit Shanghai 2018, six Huawei-hosted events held through the three-day conference.

“We have a very exciting event lined up,” O’Hara said in the statement. “We are looking forward to bringing the mobile world together in Shanghai.”

Highlights From Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity 2018

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The annual Cannes Lions Creativity Festival is a time for inspiration, education and celebrating pioneers that blur the lines between art and marketing. AListDaily was on hand to witness the full power of the festival this year, where professionals from across the globe came to learn, network and change the industry forever.

Sessions covered topics from problem-solving to exploring new mediums—all the name of marketing inspiration.

“Your job as a marketer is to make something famous,” Niels Schuurmans, CMO of Paramount Network told AListDaily. “Any great brand has to strike [an] emotional core for it to mean something—for you to want it.”

Last year at Cannes, diversity and female empowerment drove conversation, debate and awards. In 2018, that movement not only continued but increased in calls to action.

Unilever used this year’s festival to double down on their Unstereotype Alliance; a coming together of powerful consumer brands who, in their own words, “seek to eradicate harmful gender-based stereotypes.”

“Cannes is an important point for us to stop, reflect . . . we definitely use this moment to learn and get better,” said Aline Santos, EVP global marketing and head of diversity and inclusion at Unilever.

Cannes Lions is an experience in itself, but brands like Pinterest and Spotify brought installations to help visualize and interact with their platforms. Pinterest erected touchscreen interfaces where delegates could browse Pinterest and a real-life wall of Pins allowed guests to discover and take ideas with them, such as where to eat.

Others, like Google and Twitter, took over entire stretches of French coastline to engage delegates. Spotify, which won Media Brand of the Year sponsored its own beach to host meetings and a concert.

“It’s a great way to build relationships with our partners, hear what’s top of mind for them and really collaborate to find new ways to work together,” said Danielle Lee, global head of partner solutions at Spotify.

Want more? Read all our Cannes Lions coverage here.

 

Cannes Lions Behind-The-Scenes: Pinterest’s Eric Edge

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Pinterest, which has made recent strides in video advertising, made its presence known at Cannes Lions this year with interactive experiences and sessions that discussed inspiration, hands-on marketing and how technology is impacting the future of creativity.

AListDaily caught up with Eric Edge, head of global marketing communications at Pinterest to talk about the challenges and benefits of personalization in marketing.

Pinterest uses artificial intelligence to learn what users like and adapts to show results in real time. Edge stressed the importance of meeting consumer individuality without changing a brand’s core message.

“‘Brand’ is a very interesting concept,” he said. “Just because you want to personalize content for people doesn’t mean you have to change your story. You can have a solid brand story and very, very solid brand architecture and tweak that a little bit based on who you’re talking to. At its very core, you’re telling the same story—you’re doing just it in a way that’s more relevant and personalized for the audience you’re talking to.”

In the case of Pinterest, it’s a visual platform but its users collect ideas (“Pins”) and go out and purchase or try those ideas as well. Edge says that being able to speak to users on a personal level applies to everything in the marketing space and should not be ignored.

“It’s easy to talk about everything else that’s happening in innovation and technology but at our core, humans are visual people and that’s going to drive things forward when it comes to search or discovery in the future,” said Edge.

Edge served as a juror on the very first Social and Influencer Lion award panel this year—an honor that he called “better than a master class” on social media marketing. He predicted that after seeing the campaigns at Cannes Lions this year, the idea of personalization will go beyond technology.

“At [the] very core of social is personalization. It’s going to define the way that marketers think about their marketing strategies, whether it’s on platforms like Pinterest or even mainstream traditional media like TV. They’re going to think about personalization in an entirely new way and we’ve seen that in a lot of the work this year.”

Robot Fraud Could Comprise Up To 90 Percent Of Campaign Clicks

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Beware the rise of the robots, as a study from Dianomi indicates that up to 90 percent of clicks generated by some campaigns do not come from humans. But, even though Dianomi warns advertisers to be vigilant of robot clicks and to never pay for them, it also explains that not all robots are necessarily bad.

The report identifies eight different robot types, with the most commonly benign being Feed Fetchers, Search Engine Bots and Commercial Crawlers (spiders used to extract authorized data on behalf of digital marketing tools). Malicious robots include Impersonators, Hacker Tools and Scrapers (bots used for unauthorized data extraction). According to the study’s findings, humans account for 48.2 percent of users, while the bad robots outnumber the good ones at 28.9 and 22.9 percent respectively.

“While the number of robot traffic we detected in 2018 is only 32 percent, down from 60 percent in 2017, that figure varies greatly by month and, as recently as April 2017, was as high as 85 percent,” Dianomi states the report, which goes on to state that robots have averaged 38 percent of clicks since 2013. However, that number varies significantly from year-to-year, and even more wildly from month-to-month.

Robot clicks by publisher varied from 2 to 100 percent from 2013 to 2018, and that’s after disqualifying publishers that generated less than 10,000 clicks during that time. There doesn’t seem to be much correlation between the size of the publisher in terms of clicks delivered and the percent of robot clicks. The same trends appeared when Dianomi looked at publishers that delivered 100,000 clicks.

As for the cause of the bot epidemic, Dianomi cites the Association of National Advertisers’ bot fraud report, which states: “Behind every big bot problem, someone is paying a traffic source,” after observing that sourced traffic has 3.6x the amount of fraud as non-sourced traffic—suggesting that some publishers are buying traffic from questionable sources and are getting robot clicks.

Both the ANA and Dianomi found that bots are becoming much better at mimicking human behavior or at least working with them. In its 2016-17 study, the ANA found that 75 percent of fraud came from computers that had both human and robot users on them at the same time. Dianomi wrote that bots are showing greater sophistication, such as having a browser’s built-in user agent, which performs tasks like optimizing a website to better work on a device, to spread clicks over a longer period of time and over several IP addresses.

Dianomi recommends that publishers carefully measure the amount of robot traffic that may have been delivered when buying clicks. There are standard ways that benign robots identify themselves so that they can be programmed to know where not to click.

Malicious robots that don’t obey these rules can also be detected because they still act in ways that are not humanlike, “like measuring ad viewability of display advertising, measuring the number of robot clicks is critical to achieving ROI on your ad spend,” states Dianomi.

The report has four tips for combating bot fraud:

  1. Use a third-party platform to analyze the clicks
  2. Automatically void any clicks coming from high-risk IP addresses.
  3. Ask your ad partners to provide full transparency of the clicks with time, IP address, user agent and other data, and whether they have validated or voided them.
  4. Check any IP addresses generating click and impression counts over thresholds for any hour, day or week based on monthly and daily reports.
  5. For extra certainty, clicks can be passed through a captcha provided by Google, and the user may need to authenticate if the platform deems the click as suspicious.