BERLIN AND SAN FRANCISCO – Adjust, the mobile attribution and analytics company and the market leader in fraud prevention tools, announced their forecast that so-called “click injection” fraud is set to become one of the dominant forms of mobile marketing fraud in 2017.
This new approach allows fraudulent app publishers to get money by injecting fake “clicks” from a user’s device just as the user installs an app. The clicks are generated from within a fraudulent app and timed perfectly to be received within a second of the app download. Currently, click injection is effective on Android only, as it uses so-called “install broadcasts” to time the click. As a result, the fake clicks are frequently given credit for the user’s conversion. This effectively poaches organic conversions and conversions from legitimate publishers.
“Since the fraudulent approaches we announced last year have now been proliferated by the latest tools and solutions, fraudsters are seeing their average takings plummet, and as such are looking for new ways to game the system,” says Andreas Naumann, Fraud Specialist at Adjust. “This new scheme is technically similar to ‘click-spamming’ we described early last year, but evades the tools that prevent click spam. We’re expecting it to roughly supplant and equal click-spamming activities in size, which accounted for an estimated 5 % of ad engagements on Android.”
The company is currently testing different algorithms to prevent the fraudulently claimed conversions as part of their Fraud Prevention Suite of software tools protecting advertisers.
Expecting a release later in the quarter, Adjust’s Co-Founder and CTO Paul H Muller, says: “Fraud prevention takes a fine and deliberate touch, as you’re looking to delicately change mobile attribution on-the-fly. Rushing to repair datasets is just as likely to aggravate the inaccuracies that faked conversions cause. That’s ultimately the long-term problem for data-driven mobile advertisers: skewed conversion numbers and dirty data.”
For more information, please visit www.adjust.com/click-
About Adjust
Adjust is a business intelligence platform for mobile apps, providing the most comprehensive and reliable analytics and attribution solutions for companies worldwide. With Adjust’s open source SDK, app developers can track and analyze user acquisition, feature releases, user lifetime cohorts and more. Adjust provides streamlined reporting for understandable, actionable and comparable metrics. Adjust is a Facebook Marketing Partner and a Twitter Marketing Platform Partner, and dynamic Adjust integration is trusted by over 800 networks worldwide. Founded in Berlin in 2012, Adjust today has global offices in San Francisco, Istanbul, Tokyo and Shanghai.
Adjust is trusted by clients across Asia, the EU and the Americas: including leading app and IT companies like Spotify, Uber, Yelp; global brands like Universal Media, Yandex and Sony Music; as well as the world’s largest advertising and media agencies, including Vivaki, Publicis and GroupM. Adjust supports clients on the ground from each global office, and offers fully localized solutions in multiple languages.
Under the hood, Adjust’s open source SDK provides powerful functionality to track users in complex environments. Offline tracking and event buffering keeps data consistent and clean. Inbuilt purchase de-duplication and currency conversion allows clients to understand revenue streams across the globe, and with top-notch privacy features, user opt-outs are always fully respected. Since it’s open source, there are no black boxes, no hidden functionality – the source code is open to all.
Adjust is the only mobile analytics company to meet stringent EU privacy compliance standards, proving that app tracking does not have to be intrusive. Adjust is funded by Target Partners, Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital, and Highland Capital.
