You need someone who’s streetwise
to deal with the traffic.

A considerable amount of internet traffic is unreliable or fraudulent. But never fear: our programmatic buying is geared up to avoid it. Read how we deal with online industry challenges as we strive to secure quality inventory for you.

Since programmatic first started around a decade ago, shady operators have invented bots to boost non-human traffic, or simply to drive traffic to low quality sites. Their aim is to monetize traffic with fraudulent advertiser impressions. Over recent years, the world’s largest advertisers have been working hard to keep the digital ecosystem supply chain as clean and trustworthy as possible. The demand for transparency is supported by the introduction of privacy related regulations such as The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as ads.txt by IAB Tech Lab.

As a buyer, you should be aware of the types of dubious practice used by questionable publishers. Your absolute best protection is to choose a programmatic partner who is diligent about digging into the quality of a site’s content, and its audience, in order to protect you, the buyer.

How Emerse works to secure quality

Ads.txt

The Emerse DSP fully integrates Ads.txt and automatically filters out unauthorized bid requests from all suppliers. This, combined with our curated site lists, provides for quality assured inventory with full transparency.

The mission of the ads.txt project is simple: to increase transparency in the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers and is a simple, flexible and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly declare the companies they have authorized to sell their digital inventory. In this way, you can be confident that you are using a legitimate partner, with all the assurance that entails.

According to IAB Tech Labs, this public record of Authorized Digital Sellers, ads.txt, creates greater transparency in the inventory supply chain and gives publishers control over their inventory in the market. This makes it harder for shady operators to profit from selling counterfeit inventory across the ecosystem.

We are closely following all development efforts to achieve a similar filtering method for mobile-apps; until now this has been rather uncharted territory. Happily, in the summer of 2018, the IAB unveiled a proposal that aims to create the equivalent of the ads.txt standard for mobile apps. Once rolled out and adopted, this solution will most likely prevent much of the app spoofing that can occur in mobile; similar to what ads.txt has done for domain spoofing on the web. This is great news for online advertising! Be on the lookout for app-ads.txt from IAB Tech Lab.

GDPR Consent Toolkit

The European data protection regulation framework, GDPR, is incredibly important for all organizations. Emerse has built a toolkit for customers using our smart-tag to build retargeting audiences efficiently. Our tag provides an effective shortcut for obtaining user approval on your website for personal data storage. If you choose to use our solid technical solution for GDPR customization, we supply just two tags for you to effortlessly install.

Sensitive ad categories

When uploading creatives in our platform, be sure to select any sensitive categories to doubly ensure that you buy appropriate inventory, depending on your content. Not all publishers allow ads with content that is ambiguous, evasive, or open to more than one interpretation to run; your campaign could risks being blocked by default. For example gambling is not permitted in some countries. Other sensitive categories include alcohol, tobacco, misleading claims, pharmaceuticals, politics, religion, sex, nudity, dating, violence and weight loss.

Suspicious Activity Prevention

Before buying any advertising space, we always calculate the risk first – using content ratings. We are constantly vigilant for false-clicks and any traffic that is found to be giving false-impressions.

Brand Safety

There can often be certain types of online content you’d rather your brand did not share digital space with; associations that you would be uncomfortable with. Without any intervention on your part, we automatically filter out placements that fall within selected categories. You also have the opportunity to fine-tune these filters and select or deselect them for a particular campaign.

Ad Environment

Several ad environment factors are automatically machine analysed to determine how well any particular environment is suited to your ad before that space is purchased. These factors include such as page clutter, the number of ad slots on a page and the density of ads. Also the distance between ads, the density of images and their relative position to your ads compared to other pictures on the page. The ad placement’s relevance to the target audience is also considered, using standard contextual categories (based on IAB data).

To summarise, here is a checklist to raise your ad buyer IQ (Inventory Quality):

1. Partner with a platform that only works with accredited vendors

Evaluate marketplaces and publishers for the value of their audience and the originality of the content. For instance, an organic, loyal audience, is preferred to consumers acquired from other sources. You should also avoid content farms and look-a-like sites that exist only as a backdrop to sell ad impressions. Think of it like this: You, yourself, probably prefer to consume your daily news from a well-known news agency rather than by visiting a low quality site packed with ads.

2. Check that they use ads.txt

This mechanism has made an enormous impact in combating domain spoofing. By choosing which domains to work with carefully, and only working with whitelisted domains, many issues around quality can be avoided entirely. Simply ad /ads.txt at the end of the URL of the publisher to check them up.

3. Choose where your ads are actually going to run

Work with partners who are proactively working to build a fraud-free ecosystem; Partners who take bold action to combat whenever necessary. Together with our trusted suppliers, we can very quickly identify pockets of inventory that may need closer scrutiny and we take decisive action whenever it’s needed; like shutting down operators who don’t follow our quality policies. Good for us. Good for you.

You need someone who’s streetwise to deal with the traffic.