In this paper, I’ll try to explain with commonly known words, how the mobile industry is being

attacked by ourselves. First, we’ll be reviewing some industry concepts and words so it’ll be
easier to comprehend.

Why do we download a specific app or maybe why do we have a catalog of apps running
around our mobile phone?

Like any other industry, there’s a product (the apps we use daily). Those apps designed for
different purposes doesn’t just download on your phone by a miracle, you choose them and
download them so you can fulfill a certain need or maybe because it took your attention
(that’s our focus).

As individuals, we are constantly being bombed by ads day by day, we can see them on the
highway, on the tv, on the radio, we can experience ads (such as 7up, Kitkat, Coca-cola
advertising experience). Advertising is at its full throttle and we can’t expect not to be
bombed with ads through the only thing every human has on them all the time: our mobile
phone.

We now know that there’s a whole industry being developed using the mobile phone as a
medium for those apps developers who design their product to simplify the users life. But
how do they obtain users?

We can classify the strategies by Organic or paid. Organic means that users download the
app by searching the web, they find the landing page of certain app and decides to acquire it
because it matches the users needs.

But let’s be honest, if the web page doesn’t have a good positioning in the search engine
and if it’s not in the first two pages of Google then it won't have organic traffic at all (no one
goes further than the second page of Google search). That’s why the developers have to
quickly adapt and invest in advertising.

Every app has an inventory. An inventory is a designed space in the app that allows other
apps to buy it and start publishing their own. But it’s not that simple, normally the apps sell
their inventory through an Ad server who’ll make a recall to an SSP (Supply-side platform)
who will finally retrieve an Ad that passes through the Ad exchange. Basically, a bunch of
calls are made through a system in less than a second that will sell your inventory to the
highest bid and retrieve the Ad to be displayed in your app inventory. This is App
monetization.

Almost the same process occurs with the advertiser, let's think that we are Uber and we
would like to increase our users by a mobile campaign. First, we need to establish the
budget, once we’ve decided the budget then we’ll connect our Ad server to a trading desk
where we bid for the inventory accordingly to the targeted audience. Once we’ve gained the
bid our ad (image or video) will go through the DSP (Demand-side platform) who’ll connect
the Ad through the Ad exchange followed by the SSP and later to the Ad server who will play
or show the image or video.

A bit complex don’t you think? but let’s have a simpler look:
Advertiser: UBER - Ad server - DSP - Ad exchange - SSP - Ad server - Clash of clans:
Publisher

Unfortunately, if the process were that simple, there won't be any fraud-related.

The ad servers are connected to different Ad Networks, the networks are usually people
working independently who usually connects to other networks to find quality traffic or best-
paid campaigns to run. The problem in these networks is that they work with fraudulent
companies that run your campaigns through bot traffic, wrong time attribution, click
spamming, duplicates and goes on and on.

But one of the latest and most annoying fraud committed it’s called: “Shaving”.

I´m not talking about the common habit of razing the beard. I´m talking about a type of fraud
that has become pretty usual in the past months. The whole mobile ecosystem is crowded
with several networks that don't add any value to the market or their clients. Most of them
receive a campaign from an Advertiser, downgrade a percentage of the Payout (so they can
have their profit share), and pass the campaign to another network. This last will do the
same, and so on and so forth, until somebody actually runs the campaign and publicizes the
banners so it can be downloaded (Or generate fraudulent installs).

This is the normal flow when running campaigns through networks.

Let's say that an Advertiser shared their campaign with three different networks (A, B and
C). They all received the campaign at the same rate (2 U$D). Network A and B shared it with
four other networks with 70% of the original rate (1,40 U$D) since they need to profit from
the conversion. Network C shared the campaign with several other networks, with a rate
higher than the original payout. Why?

By raising the Payout of the offer way higher than the original or higher than their
competitors, the publishers will prefer to run their offer instead of the network A and B.
Traffic will be sent to the campaign, which will generate installs, but the shady network C will
not fire all the conversion postbacks to their publishers. It will only fire a percentage of it.

Let's say the Advertiser sees 10 conversions on their side, coming from Network C, that
would be 20 U$D. Since the shady Network C does the shaving, they will only notify a
percentage of it to their publishers (Let's say only 3.)

By notifying only the 15% of their installs as valid, the shady network would be gaining and
collecting the remaining 75% of the installs made from the advertiser (let’s say Uber) who’ll
be paying the whole price without knowing the true value of those installs or if the campaign
was well implemented, in other words, the advertiser pays full price for ghost installs and lost
clicks.

This type of tricky scam generates an unstable and unreliable environment to the mobile
industry. It also impacts in a great loss for companies that are trying to do the right thing.
There are many ways to avoid this problematic sort of scheme. One of them is to run
campaigns that are less re brokered or those that come from trustworthy partners.

You should always analyze all the performance data that you have, so you can try to be one
step ahead of those shady partners and frauds, and most importantly, get together with
reliable partners.

Let´s be all committed to a clean and fair mobile industry.