Buzz City Teams Up With Academics To Prevent Click Fraud | MMA Global

Buzz City Teams Up With Academics To Prevent Click Fraud

April 23, 2012

Source: MobiAd News:

Buzz City Teams Up With Academics To Prevent Click Fraud

Mobile advertising company BuzzCity has announced it is teaming up with academics from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in an attempt to further safeguard ad quality online.

The campaign tackles use of the dominant advertising model Cost Per Click (CPC), ensuring users can’t generate fraudulent clicks - either manually, or through the use of specially designed ‘bots’.

Click fraud can seriously damage the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, and is also damaging for website visitors, causing promotional messages to become misleading and unreliable.

BuzzCity CEO, Dr K F Lai, said: “As mobile traffic and internet advertising grows, click fraud has the potential to diminish the trust of advertisers who otherwise should be getting better returns from their growing mobile budgets.”

The company’s sophisticated algorithms find specific patterns in data, including IP addresses, user sessions, carrier information, and browser detection. These provide clues that help BuzzCity monitor potential fraud.

“BuzzCity already has a system in place to detect and discard fraudulent clicks before they reach advertisers’ accounts, but we want to ensure that it doesn’t become an issue moving forward.”

Their collaboration with a research team at the NUS aims to take this existing defence further, Lai said, with members of the Department of Computer Science using their expertise in the field to analyse data collected by BuzzCity.

Professor Wong Lim Soon, head of computer science as NUS said: “While it may never be possible to reveal the intent behind a click, research like this – whether it is a competitor who has a vested interest in draining its rival’s ad spend, or a publisher who wants to earn more money without investing in the audience – will help create mathematical models to better identify quality traffic for advertisers, and improve earnings for publishers.”