Every year ad fraud costs advertisers billions of dollars. However, beyond fighting device farms, click injections, SDK spoofing or bot and emulators, brands also have to deal with whether their ads appear in content that is appropriate.

Brand safety refers to issues related to the content where your ads will appear. Simply put, you want your ads to appear in articles or videos that are safe for work and do not feature specific topics that you believe are inappropriate for your brand.

The key to fighting ad fraud is to use the right platforms.

We recommend using Integral Ad Science (IAS) or MOAT.

Either of these tools will provide crucial information such as:

• Viewability across desktop, mobile, app and video
• Impressions delivered in specific types of content and percent of unsafe inventory
• Out of geo impressions (outside of your target location)
• Invalid traffic from sophisticated and general fraud
• Engagement metrics for video advertising such as how many impressions were in full view or were watched with the sound on
• Completion rate for video ads

However, the most important benefit of ad verification tools is the capability to block impressions delivered in unsafe content.

For example, if a publisher’s 1st party ad server decided to display your ad in an article related to tobacco or alcohol or violence, IAS will simply block this impression. In other words, your ad will not be shown.

All our clients have access to brand safety and ad verification tools.

One of the benefits of running campaigns through an ad verification tool is the capability of evaluating the true cost of advertising. Read our whitepaper on the True Cost of Facebook Advertising.