The hidden rules revealed! Analysis of cheating methods and anti-cheating methods in the mobile advertising industry

1. Click cheating

Click fraud is a relatively low-cost and easy method. It can usually be sent directly using a large number of test machines or simulators. Some methods also involve hiring or incentivizing users to make a large number of clicks.

By analyzing the click data logs, it is not difficult to find several phenomena:

1. IP dispersion is dense

2. Repeated time cycle

3. Data is not sent by the mobile terminal but by the simulator

4. Unable to obtain UA information on the mobile terminal

How to prevent click fraud?

1. Cookie deduplication: When placing ads on mobile devices, it is often possible to add monitoring links, similar to PC, so that the information of the page visited during the jump can be recorded, which can prevent the same device from clicking on the same ad multiple times.

2. IP to prevent cheating: When brushing clicks, it is definitely not just the same device that is used, so in addition to Cookie deduplication, it can also be deduplicated based on IP. Nowadays, people surf the Internet with dynamic IP addresses. Cheaters change IP addresses by going online and offline with a dialer. You can identify them by the C-segment IP. If a large number of IP numbers with the same C-segment, such as 218.175.11.x, appear, it may be cheating.

3. Click validity period: limit the validity period of clicks. During the validity period, subsequent conversions will be attributed to the corresponding platform. If the validity period is exceeded, it will not be calculated. Generally, it can be 1 day.

4. Abnormal data blacklist: For some click sources with periodic nature, or click records of non-mobile data, those exceeding a certain range will be marked as blacklisted. For long term filtration.

2. Activate cheats

In addition to clicks, the mobile side also has more performance data, that is, subsequent activation, registration, payment and other behaviors can be monitored, and of course, can be cheated. Common methods include simulating downloads with test machines or simulators that match the clicks, modifying device information through mobile manual or technical means, cracking the SDK to send virtual information, simulating download activation, etc.

The phenomenon of activation cheating also includes:

1. IP dispersion is dense

2. Repeated time cycle

3. Simulator Send

4. The attribution time difference is illogical, etc.

So how do we prevent activation?

1.Device number deduplication: The device number deduplication can be divided into several aspects:

a) For cheating methods such as manual or simulator downloads and activations, the most basic device number deduplication must be performed.

b) For cheating to modify device information to add activation, we need to clearly identify the device's unique identifier. For example, the IDFA of iOS can actually be changed at will. There are many Android copycat phones in China, and many device numbers are repeated. Therefore, to deduplicate device numbers, we must be able to uniquely identify a device, not just rely on public device identifiers such as IDFA and MAC.

2. Activate IP duplication: Similar to clicks, multiple activations of the same IP segment should also be marked as abnormal activations.

3. Cheating by attribution time difference: Attribution time difference refers to the time from click to download activation. Generally, when cheating, fake clicks and activations coexist. He doesn't care which comes first, as long as he encounters it. Therefore, the time logic is often wrong, for example, the activation time is earlier than the click time or the time difference is too short. These activations should also be marked as abnormal activations.

4. SDK encryption protection: Encrypt the SDK for transmission and activation to increase the cost of cracking cheating.

Advertisers are the biggest victims in the advertising chain, so many advertisers are trying every possible way to prevent fraud. However, this process is often troublesome, and the manual comparison work is numerous and tedious. In addition, it is difficult to fully protect against cheating such as brushing device numbers using in-house technology. At the same time, marketing promotion often involves concurrent operations on multiple platforms and channels, so it is indeed difficult to do it on your own. Although cheating is difficult to prevent completely, we can prevent cheating by continuously increasing the cheating cost for cheaters to restore the authenticity of the data.

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