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Want to get ahead of mobile ad fraud in 2024? Leverage Pulse’s smart alerts

Micah Motta, Senior Content Writer, Adjust, Feb 06, 2024.

Did you know that an estimated 30% of mobile ad spend was lost to fraud in 2023? As technology advances, so too do fraudsters’ methods. The good news? Adjust always stays ahead of mobile ad fraud, providing advanced solutions to help app developers and marketers proactively protect their budgets from fraud. Now we’ll dive into how one of these solutions, Pulse smart alerts, works in tandem with Adjust’s Fraud Prevention solution to combat mobile ad fraud.

Stay ahead of ad fraud with smart alerts

Keeping abreast of all the metrics in today’s cross-device marketing world can be daunting for app growth marketers. In addition to paying attention to campaign performance across different devices and channels, they need to spot sources of fraudulent activity quickly. This is where Pulse’s smart alerts for mobile ad fraud come in handy.

Reminder: What is Pulse?

Pulse is Adjust’s smart alerts solution that allows marketers to set highly customized alerts to track a vast selection of KPIs, monitoring across apps, partners, countries, and channels.

Marketers can set up a smart alert to ping them or other team members hourly, daily, or weekly via email or Slack. These automated alerts save marketers valuable time and ensure they never miss another insight or anomaly—including alerts on fraud!

Simply create your own alert or choose a template

In Pulse, marketers can create their own alert rule to monitor the metrics specific to their app business. But to make things even easier, Adjust also has templates from which marketers can choose to monitor key metrics like ad spend, fraud, campaign performance, and cohorted performance.

Zooming in on fraud, marketers can quickly set up a Pulse fraud alert using the following templates: Rejected install rate, abnormal install distribution, and click spam alert.

Real-life examples of alerts for fraud with Pulse

Let’s dive into some practical examples of how you can set up fraud alerts with Pulse.

Use case 1: Alerts when rejected installs are too high

We get it. Fake installs are stressful, but monitoring them doesn’t have to be. Rather than going back and forth every day to check on the rejected installs of your campaigns, why not set an alert on Pulse to do so? In Pulse, you can create an alert to let you know if the number of rejected installs in any of your campaigns is higher than a specified amount.

The example below reveals how marketers can set an alert for rejected installs for multiple campaigns.

Example alert 1:

Alert me on Slack weekly when “Rejected installs” are “greater than” the value of “70”.

Use case 2: Alerts for potential click spam

Click spam affects your cost per acquisition (CPA), cannibalizes organic traffic, causes confusion over traffic sources, and can ultimately lower your app store ranking. Campaigns with high clicks but low click conversion rates often indicate that click spam is occurring.

Marketers can set up a Pulse alert that simultaneously monitors clicks and click conversion rates so they can stay informed and respond quickly.

Example alert 2:

Alert me by email weekly when campaign A has “Clicks” that are “Greater than 100,000” AND a “Click Conversion Rate” that is “less than 0.05%”.

You can learn more about click spam and other types of ad fraud in the Adjust guide to mobile ad fraud.

Use case 3: Alerts for anomalies in cost per install

We know growth marketers oversee a plethora of metrics, often on a daily basis. However, there are some metrics they need to check with regularity, but these aren’t their core daily metrics. Adjust clients can have peace of mind by setting alerts in Pulse to detect anomalies so they don’t have to worry about unusual activity in key metrics.

How to set up Anomaly Detection alerts in Pulse:

Select your app.
Decide the frequency you want to be alerted.
Pick the metric you wish to track.
Set your confidence level.*
Get back to work and let Pulse monitor the metric for you.

*Confidence level indicates how accurate you’d like the alerts to be. The higher the confidence level, the fewer alerts you’ll receive.

Don’t let fraud eat your ad budget

Bottom line: With the right mobile measurement partner (MMP), mobile ad fraud is preventable. You don’t need to pay twice for cannibalized users or worry about the accuracy of your campaign performance if you utilize Adjust’s Fraud Prevention solution. Fraudulent installs are rejected in real-time and your data and budgets are protected from data inaccuracies.

And take advantage of our latest innovation, fraud alerts with Pulse. You can set up notifications for your key metrics and then go back to strategizing, knowing Pulse will monitor fraudulent activity within your campaigns for you. It’s that easy.

Ready to make your app marketing in 2024 more efficient, agile, and secure? Make data-driven decisions with confidence by partnering with Adjust. Schedule your demo now to learn how we can help you prevent mobile ad fraud and drive app growth.