Edgemesh announces new feature to fight ad and click fraud

E-commerce platform Edgemesh has announced a new feature aimed at identifying and protecting brands against ad and click fraud at the infrastructure-level.

What it does. Ad Protect is an upgrade of the Edgemesh Server. It analyzes the network used (VPN, data center, etc.) and combines that with the history of users’ actions to automatically detect bots and users who are continually clicking on ads but not generating conversions. Once a visitor surpasses a particular ad-click rate, they and their IP address are tagged. That tag is used by the ad platform to automatically exclude bad actors from future ad campaigns. The company says this will result in real-time adaptive campaign protection across any platform that supports retargeting including Google Ads, Facebook, Criteo, Bing and TikTok.

The problem. Ad spend losses to fraud will reach $68 billion globally this year, a $9 billion increase from 2021, according to Juniper Research. The U.S. is expected to account for 35% of ad fraud losses this year, estimated to reach $23 billion. Edgemesh’s own research found that a high volume of fraudulent clicks deliver zero revenue-making impact on ad spend. In fact across its e-commerce customers, the average daily loss exceeds $5,300 for Facebook Campaigns and $5,700 per day on Google.

Why we care. Inflation isn’t only a problem in the global economy. Click and ad inflation costs advertisers money in a couple of ways. First, via paying too much for too little. Second, in bad data suggesting a campaign is more successful than it is. Anything that can stop that is a huge plus.

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About The Author

Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.