The digital advertising ecosystem has for sometime tried to portray bad ads, malvertising and ad quality issues in general as a problem for Publishers. In reality, these issues, sometimes referred to as demand-side ad fraud, are a problem for Publishers, in large part because Ad Platforms don’t take enough action to eliminate the problem before it ends up on a Publisher’s site.

Publishers need their Ad Platform partners to take malvertising and other ad quality problems as seriously as they expect publishers to tackle supply-side ad fraud. This means educating Ad Platforms on the impact of bad ads, and how to identify and eliminate them. 

Here are 5 things that Ad Platforms need to know about bad ads:

1 - Publishers expect their partners to eliminate bad ads. The time has passed where Publishers were willing to tackle this issue on their own. While many have strong processes in place, they now expect their Ad Platform partners to do likewise, and will consider who they partner with on that basis.

2 - Bad ads are served to Publishers by Ad Platforms. Bad actors often get their malicious, or poor quality ads out to their unsuspecting targets (users) by posing as legitimate advertisers on ad networks, or other ad service platforms. By monitoring the advertisers they work with, platforms can effectively cut off much of the bad ad supply at the source, before it ever reaches users at page level.

3 - Advertiser behaviour can be an early warning sign. Often, new advertisers on platforms will start with perfectly clean ads, in order to avoid early detection. However ad ops teams on the platform side will notice that changes start to be made to the ad content sometime afterward. This is an early warning sign that you are dealing with a malicious actor.

4 - Floor prices go up when publishers get attacked. Publishers will often use the tactic of raising floor prices in programmatic environments when under attack from a malicious advertiser, in order to cut off the low cost point of entry. By allowing attacks and malicious behaviour to skip through, platforms make it more costly to do business.

5 - The cost of doing nothing is high. Malvertising erodes trust throughout the digital ecosystem, putting a strain on otherwise strong business partnerships between Publishers and their platform partners. For platforms who value their publisher relationships, putting strong solutions in place to help eliminate bad ads before they make it to web pages is a small price to pay, the alternative is lost supply side partners, and lost revenue. 

AdSecure is one of the best solutions on the market today to eliminate bad ads before they are served to Publishers via Ad Platforms. Read our client case study and and see how AdSecure completely eliminated Malware attacks from Traffic Factory's ad network. Why not sign up for a free trial today and see what AdSecure can do for you.