Curation has become a hot topic over the past year and can be defined in different ways depending on who you ask. Media buyers look at curation as selecting specific sites or even specific vendors based on what inventory they offer. A vendor might look at curation as specific sites or groups of inventory based on performance metrics like viewability or clicks – this might not align with the buyer’s expectations as we tend to be looking for quality of environment versus metrics that can easily be gamed.
The Growing Threat of Fraudulent Traffic
Buyers and vendors both need to keep savvy to stay on top of fraudulent activities that have become more prevalent with universal access to AI allowing for quick generation of content to populate pages and entire sites to monetize ad space. AI slop is not the only issue, as engagement with ads and website can also be faked which makes performance look strong while business results are not.
Generative AI can produce text, images, video, and even code to help anyone with basic knowledge produce bots (automated programs) that mimic human activity including unique website visits and actions across a website such as viewing and clicking content or even submitting a form. While the client may be filtering through this activity on their end, your pixels or event tracking is not. This creates a huge problem where ad tracking is marking certain vendors or sites as successful placements while also feeding false information into your audience modelling data.
Block Lists vs. Allow Lists
In 2024 Tech News World reported that 49.6% of all internet traffic wasn’t human, underlining the need for strong bot detection software on the publisher side and ruthless auditing of vendors and placements on the buyer side. Vendors and direct buyers can mitigate issues with regular auditing of where ad impressions ran and employing block or allow lists for programmatic buys.
The standard practice for online advertisers has been to employ block lists to stop ads from serving on certain sites or even in specific content. Allow lists have become increasingly popular as these permit ads to serve only on a curated list of sites, ensuring quality of environment.
Curating allow lists rather than block lists gives buyers the choice to run ads only on sites they deem credible. This does limit the ability to optimize for performance as there are less placements being used, but that performance data is much more likely to be from real people (which is a priority for most!)
How to Vet Your Vendors and Ad Placements
The catalysts driving this change include industry attention to made-for-advertising sites, shady conversion attribution and the recent CSAM incident reported by Adalytics.
Media buyers need to be rigorous in their vendor screening, ensuring quality checks including:
- Fraud detection and prevention tools
- Demand-side platforms or publishers used
- Willingness to provide list of placements where ads ran
This last point is key as vendors who will not tell you what sites your ads ran on are not vetting carefully and utilize gray inventory (low quality sites with cheap ad space). Don’t settle for a lack of transparency as many vendors will happily share an excel list of all the URLs your ads ran on or include a live reporting dashboard that populates that data.
For direct buyers, ensure you are doing routine checks in your demand-side platform to vet where ads are showing. It is cumbersome but necessary to check those unfamiliar links and anything out of the ordinary with a familiar publisher’s address such as the addition of numbers or misspelt words in the URL. Vetting quality of ad environment should consider:
- User experience: Are there too many ads on the page? Is the environment so cluttered that it is hard to look at? If the site doesn’t look appealing for an actual human to spend time on, then it isn’t drawing in real users.
- Quality of content: What is the theme about this site? Is it cohesive or does it appear as a mish mash of random articles? This could indicate that the site is being pulled together only for the purposes of running ads and not because it holds any value for users.
Trust Your Gut When Curating Your Ads
Following your intuition is important when vetting websites for advertising suitability. There are new sites generated daily, and they may not appear cluttered or full of random content on first blush – but they will look strange in terms of why there are certain buckets of content. Bottom line is if you are wondering who would even bother to look at a site then it belongs on the exclusion list.
Want to know more? Reach out to Sara, our Associate Media Director, at sara.kerr@zgm.ca