MoPub partners with Pixalate, DoubleVerify to fight in-app ad fraud

MoPub announced Tuesday it is partnering with Pixalate and DoubleVerify to help reduce invalid traffic (IVT) and in-app ad fraud on the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange. Pixalate and DoubleVerify are accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) as mobile IVT-management vendors.

Why you should care

As investment in mobile advertising has taken off, so have opportunities for ad fraud. In-app ad fraud was estimated to have cost the industry nearly $5 billion in 2018. MoPub’s integrations with Pixalate and DoubleVerify are aimed at vetting traffic signals and blocking invalid bid requests in real-time, pre-bid and analyzing post-bid activity to help publishers improve their traffic quality.

Signals used to detect IVT will include:

• Viewability rates and ad implementation
• App store rankings, user downloads, descriptions and market reach
• App content, user experience and ad capabilities
• General invalid traffic (GIVT) and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) fraud signals, including clicks and impressions generated by crawlers, scripts and agents; illegitimate traffic based on device and ad-tag hijacking; spoofed source information by Device ID and Bundle ID.

MoPub’s head of product Boris Logvinskiy said bringing on Pixalate and DoubleVerify as partners was a crucial step in company’s goal to eliminate ad-fraud on its ad exchange. “MRC-accredited vendors like Pixalate and DoubleVerify offer the expertise, technology, data integrity and service needed to help us keep a clean exchange for the trillions of ad requests that we facilitate,” says Boris Logvinskiy

More on the news

• MoPub says, with the help of Twitter’s policy operations team, it vets publishers before they’re on-boarded and penalize any who are non-compliant.
• The company reports it currently has more than 180 DSP partners and more than 50,000 mobile apps on the exchange.
• Pixalate received its MRC accreditation for sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) detection in July, 2017 and DoubleVerify was accredited in December, 2017.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.