Ad Fraud & Bot Protection: Choose Your Tool Wisely

Choosing the right tool from your security toolbox…

Modern businesses have many tools in their toolbox to secure web applications. They often start with a web application firewall (WAF), a well-known and established tool to protect against common known vulnerabilities like the OWASP Top 10. But unfortunately, WAFs cannot distinguish between human and bot traffic well, so other tools, such as bot management and ad fraud solutions, have been designed to address specialized security use cases.

Bot protection and ad fraud prevention are similar to one another in some respects, but are typically purpose-built to meet the needs of different buyers in an organization. 

• Ad fraud solutions provide protection and analytics to digital marketers that control budget spend or validate metrics for advertisers on marketing campaigns. They can block malicious users, provide analyses to show legitimate users, and reveal savings from blocked click fraud.
• Bot management solutions, on the flip side, provide protection against malicious bots for a broad set of security use cases, often including ad fraud.

While there are differences, the similarities between the two solutions lead to some common questions, addressed in this article. We conclude with a quick guide to help you choose the right tool for your needs.

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Are bot management and ad fraud prevention interchangeable?

Using a single tool for multiple tasks to keep it simple is tantalizing, but can become a trap if the tool is not designed to be a complete solution. For example, companies that already have ad fraud protection implemented in the marketing department may be encouraged by ad fraud vendors to double down and “economize” by applying the ad fraud-focused tool across the larger bot security challenge of the IT security department.

A “two for one” deal sounds great, right? Why carry more tools than you need, especially in turbulent economic times when budgets are tightening? Unfortunately, “two for one” value from an ad fraud prevention tool rarely works out because ad fraud tools fall short. What they offer in terms of support for marketing-centric strategic priorities, they lack in terms of the capabilities needed to protect an organization’s full digital ecosystem. As it turns out, you can’t use a knife to replace the scissors in the toolbox.

On the other hand, a robust bot management tool that improves its protections against ad fraud, particularly bot-driven fraud, can both protect the company’s full digital ecosystem and support marketing-centric strategic priorities.

What is ad fraud?

Ad fraud is the act of deceiving advertising platforms and their customers by using malicious bots to falsify the number of times an online advertisement is clicked on or displayed. Ad fraud can be perpetrated by competitors or fraudulent publishers using automated bot traffic to click on ads. Digital marketers use online advertising on a daily basis to get their customers’ attention. Over 271 billion dollars were spent by advertisers on digital ads in 2023, and the forecast for 2024 is 10% higher. With that much money at stake, it’s not surprising that fraudsters want to get in on the action.

Scammers use fake clicks and the lack of transparency over digital advertising networks to spoof high-value websites by using bots to mimic visitor clicks, which siphons money quickly from advertising budgets. The result? Huge concern among both advertisers and legitimate publishers that want to ensure the transparency and effectiveness of their business offerings. And digital marketers can’t afford to waste their ad budgets without real ROI.

What do dedicated ad fraud solutions do?

Dedicated ad fraud solutions are geared towards marketers and go-to-market teams—roles like digital marketing managers, SEO managers, and BI analytics leads. These tools are primarily designed to protect customer funnels, sites, and analytics from bot fraud and fake users. For example, when it comes to client-side versus server-side integrations, ad fraud solutions often only have client-side integrations, meaning the customer doesn’t need to engage the IT team and only needs to add JavaScript code in a tag manager.

It sounds easy, and works for many marketing ad use cases. But many clients can’t ignore the client-side tag and, unbeknownst to the customers, malicious bots can still target their servers. Not only that, but the traffic will remain invisible and the customers will not be able to classify it.

How does bot protection differ from ad fraud protection?

Bot management is an approach to identify, characterize, and filter both good and bad bots that access online business assets. While it may sound similar to the ad fraud use case, bot management generally provides a more comprehensive set of capabilities to stop online fraud and malicious bots on mobile apps, websites, and APIs.

Comprehensive bot and online fraud management solutions not only protect against ad fraud, but also defend against a number of common security-oriented cyberattacks, including website scraping, inventory scalping, credential stuffing, account takeover, layer 7 DDoS attacks, and carding fraud. Bot protection solutions are built for users beyond marketers, including IT, cybersecurity, and digital commerce teams, which reflects the breadth and diversity of the mandatory requirements.

Efficient bot and online fraud management solutions use both client-side and server-side detection to capture trillions of behavioral, signature-based, and reputational signals daily and analyze each request anew against the collective data of hundreds of customer endpoints. They can determine in as little as two milliseconds whether a user is a bot or a human and respond accordingly.

Quick Tool Guide

Whether you use an ad fraud tool for security-driven use cases, or look for a bot protection tool with strong ad fraud protections, you should assess the vendor’s ability to provide complete protection for your business. Look for the following:

1. Experience with a broad set of bot protection use cases backed by named customers and case studies.
   Eradicating ad fraud is great, but there are a lot of bot protection use cases that define an effective and comprehensive solution, including website scraping, scalping, account takeover mitigation, layer 7 DDoS, payment fraud, and so forth. Beyond sales and marketing claims, however, vendors must have the proof in the pudding, so to speak, in terms of public technical documentation, named customers, and published case studies for a broad set of use cases. Does your vendor stand up to this scrutiny?
2. Recognition by either major industry analysts (e.g. Forrester, Gartner) or user review sites (e.g. G2, Peer Insights)—ideally both!
   Has your vendor been recognized by major industry analysts in a relevant—and recent—bot management report such as the Forrester Wave: Bot Management (Q2 2022) or by your peers on a reputable peer review site with relevant reports like the G2 Grid for bot detection and protection software? If not, you may want to ask why. For example, Forrester states in its Wave that vendor inclusion requires demonstrable comprehensive, enterprise-class bot management tools, specific revenue threshold for bot management, and interest and/or relevance to Forrester clients.
3. Dedicated threat research and SOC team that can help support ML/detection engine improvements over time for rapidly evolving threats.
   Bots are constantly evolving as fraudsters look for new end-runs and gaps in bot protection solutions. Dedicated threat teams can help companies defend against new threats faster, analyze trends and data from millions of signals gathered from customers worldwide in real-time, and help train machine learning models to improve automated bot protection responses. Without expert SOC resources, sophisticated bots can overrun existing defenses that can’t react fast enough.
4. Real-time bot protection that blocks automated threats in less than 2 ms.
   To ensure minimal impact of bad bots, your vendor needs to analyze all requests to your website and detect in less than 2 milliseconds whether a visitor is a human or a bot. By default, your vendor should block bad bots, but also provide the flexibility to fine-tune the response with your own custom rule sets. At DataDome, we use multiple algorithms in our bot protection software to identify and analyze visitors’ technical and behavioral parameters so you can protect against fraud automatically.
5. Innovative solutions that improve the customer experience, like a built-in, next-gen CAPTCHA vs. relying on a terrible reCAPTCHA experience.
   Some online fraud and bot protection vendors rely heavily on third-party CAPTCHAs from online advertising providers to defend their customers from bot attacks. As a result, end users suffer from terrible user experiences and trade their online privacy just to access your services and buy your products. Meanwhile, the traditional CAPTCHA is regularly bypassed by CAPTCHA solving bots. On the other hand, you could leverage a CAPTCHA solution designed by a security company that delivers a frictionless and secure user experience with better compliance with privacy laws.
6. A global support team familiar with security-centric implementations.
   Businesses implementing a bot management solution for specific security-related use cases need to rely on a team of support professionals that are familiar with typical requirements, know how to optimize deployments, and anticipate operating considerations. This helps make onboarding smooth and results more effective. A support team can mean the difference between low and high ROI. That’s one reason why DataDome maintains such a high satisfaction rating—an NPS of 73.

If you validate these six points, or use our more comprehensive bot mitigation solution checklist, you’ll have a good idea of which solution best fits your needs for bot and ad fraud protection. Because as important as the performance, availability, and security of your website is, the last thing you want is to start using a tool that makes your life more complicated, even if your prospective vendor says otherwise.

Stop Bot & Ad Fraud with DataDome Ad Protect

DataDome’s robust bot and online fraud protection has been safeguarding customers for years against the latest and greatest automated threats. To better assist marketers in the fight against ad fraud, we’ve released Ad Protect: a tool that can detect fraudulent traffic on your marketing campaigns so you can focus your ad spend on real humans. Ad Protect works hand-in-hand with our bot protection solution, as well as our next-gen verification tools like DataDome CAPTCHA and Device Check, to protect every aspect of your online ecosystem.

Book a demo today to learn more about Ad Protect and how it can keep your business safe.