TUNE, a global powerhouse in mobile marketing measurement, has just unveiled the results of a joint effort with Google that will “fundamentally address a growing type of mobile app ad fraud known as click injection on Android.”
According to the official word, click injection fraud is the process by which a non-human actor, such as a bot or malware installed on a mobile device, attempts to steal attribution credit and advertising dollars for a genuine app install. This happens when scripts or bots inject fake ad clicks between the time a person downloads and first opens an app.
It’s estimated that in 2017 $139B of all paid media advertising worldwide will go toward mobile with an estimated $7.5B spent by marketers in the United States on mobile app install advertising. TUNE estimates that click injection accounts for 30-40 percent of all mobile app install fraud and costs marketers $500-$700M.
To counter this growing issue, Google has recently launched the new Play Install Referrer API that enables measurement providers like TUNE to significantly reduce click injection fraud in the app ecosystem. TUNE is one of the mobile measurement solutions providers to integrate new Google Play referral data that provides the exact time an app download began, directly into the TUNE Marketing Console.
This newly released anonymous data detailing app install start time, coupled with TUNE’s leading app attribution analytics, captures initial app open time and all clicks or events that take place between app download and the initial open, enabling marketers to precisely measure and remove fraudulent app installs driven by click injection. Marketers who use TUNE to measure app downloads on Google Play have a new tool capable of identifying and ultimately ending fraudulent click injection without impacting real customer downloads.
“Over the last two years, we built new tools for fighting mobile ad fraud by enabling marketers and ad partners to work together, and we now lead the industry with the most granular approach,” said Peter Hamilton, Chief Executive Officer at TUNE. “What was still missing in this fight was the direct cooperation with the platforms themselves, which is why this step with Google is such a powerful one. This data connection with Google is exactly what the industry needs to completely stamp out the practice of fraudulent click injection which will immediately eradicate nearly a third of mobile ad fraud. We look forward to continued collaboration with the brilliant teams at Google to making marketing more accountable.”