When it comes to online traffic, businesses want to be sure that they are getting what they pay for. Unfortunately, online fraud is a huge issue, and it can be difficult to tell which traffic is legitimate and which is not. That’s where a tool like Opticks comes in.
What is Opticks?
Opticks is a fraud detection software that helps business owners ensure that their online traffic is legitimate and not fraudulent. In this review, we will take a look at what Opticks offers so you can determine if it’s the right fit for your company’s needs.
What is Ad Fraud Prevention?
Ad fraud detection is the process of spotting the existence of ad fraud to safeguard an organization’s advertising budget and campaign outcomes, among other things.
Since digital advertising and marketing have become pillars of contemporary business, the massive increase in ad fraud schemes has made advertising fraud detection essential for the majority of businesses.
Understanding Ad Fraud
Ad fraud refers to any effort to defraud online advertising networks to profit financially. Scammers frequently use bots to commit ad fraud, but this is not always the case. There are other ways scammers can get advertisers and ad networks to pay them.
Here are a few examples of different types of Ad Fraud:
Click fraud
This happens when users click on advertisements without intending to learn more about the content or make a purchase of a company’s goods or services.
This kind of ad fraud is typically carried out to deplete advertising budgets or to exaggerate traffic statistics. Click fraud may be committed by dishonest publishers or rivals, individuals working in click farms or robotic programs executed by malicious bots. Learn what is click farming here
Attribution Fraud
Attribution fraud is a method in which scammers use malware installed on users’ devices to steal credit for legitimate organic leads that came from a different media source.
This type of ad fraud is used to steal credit for installs by sending fraudulent clicks just before a genuine user launches an app. When they are successful, the fraudsters are compensated financially for the false attribution.
Lead Fraud
The goal of this type of ad fraud, also known as cost-per-lead (CPL) fraud, is to generate bogus leads. They can accomplish this by inventing customer data, purchasing illegal data and contact information from third-party vendors, or scraping the web for customer information with crawler bots. Bad bots can also be used to automate lead generation or sign-up forms with bogus customer data.
Impression Fraud
Impression fraud happens when scammers use pixel stuffing and ad stacking to hide advertisements on a website. Although these advertisements are invisible to the naked eye, the fake impressions are still recorded and charged to the advertiser.
This kind of fraud is frequently seen in display ads (cost-per-million advertising) and video ad fraud (both online and TV). These illegal conversions deceive legitimate advertising campaigns into paying for themselves.
These are just some of the types of ad fraud that advertisers need to be wary of.
How Opticks Works
Opticks’ sensor collects key telemetry about each visit in your traffic to generate a comprehensive set of data that is GDPR compliant. And then their algorithms go to work by evaluating the data captured in real-time using leading technologies, yielding a result that indicates whether or not the traffic is invalid.
Depending on the outcome and your settings, Opticks activates various prevention mechanisms, ranging from traffic and postback control to audience blacklisting. The software will then display all tracked and prevented activity on your site, explaining the causes of invalid activity down to the source of your traffic.
Who Should be Using Opticks?
The Opticks platform would greatly benefit the following categories of clients:
Advertisers
By identifying SEM, programmatic, affiliation, native, and other forms of fraud affecting their ad channels, Opticks can help advertisers in enhancing growth and achieve revenue targets. This enables them to make decisions based on accurate data and gain more insight into the effectiveness of their advertising.
Agencies
By ensuring the highest quality traffic to their advertising partners, using Opticks to identify and prevent ad fraud help agencies establish more credibility. This enables them to outperform rivals and collaborate with top advertisers.
Telecoms
By safeguarding their ecosystem from fraud, Opticks helps telecoms ensure the quality of their traffic. This prevents bots and malicious traffic sources while also identifying unauthorized subscriptions to safeguard mobile users. Additionally, this improves ROI and NPS while lowering the complaint rate for unwanted subscriptions.
Key Features
Detection
- Detection of GIVT and SIVT
- Four-step detection: click, visit, pre-conversion, and conversion
- Multi-channel detection
- Detection of Bot, malware, dangerous IPs, VPN/TOR/Proxy, iframes, hidden ads
- Detailed reasoning for invalid traffic
- Threats & incidents reporting
Prevention
- Google Ads: integrated set-up
- Google Ads: automated IP exclusions
- Real-time postback prevention
- Lead scoring
- Blacklisting by IP, APK, and Domains
- User-defined anti-fraud rules
- Real-time traffic control
Intelligence
- Dashboards
- Acquisition insights
- Saved spend insights
- Session forensics
- Traffic veracity across dimensions
- Reports
- API Access
Measurement
- Conversion tracking
- Cost and revenue tracking
- Partner management
- Custom conversions
Support and Advisory
- Access to knowledge base & docs
- E-mail & in-app support
- Onboarding
- Service SLA
- Technical Account Manager
- Custom support channel
- Access to a fraud specialist
- Quarterly antifraud committee
Pricing
Opticks currently offers 3 different plans:
Launch
- Advanced fraud detection
- Standard fraud prevention
- Uptime SLA
- Advanced support
- 0.5M scans
- 5 users
Grow
- Complete fraud detection
- Advanced fraud prevention
- Uptime SLA
- Advanced support
- 2M scans
- Unlimited users
Scale
- Complete fraud detection
- Complete fraud prevention
- Uptime SLA
- Priority support
- 5M scans
- Unlimited users
Opticks doesn’t publish pricing information for any of its products and services. You won’t find any price history on other review sites either. This is standard practice for software vendors and service providers. You would need to contact their team to obtain customers pricing.
Pros and Cons
Opticks’ reports and analyses are highly detailed and customizable. The tool can support the needs of customers ranging from small to mid-market businesses. Their interface is easy to use and they also have excellent support.
One downside with the tool is that dashboard setup could take up some time depending on your business model.
Alternatives
ClickGuard
ClickGuard detects Google Ads fraud. It helps you detect and eliminate fraud attacks in your campaigns while also protecting you from bot farms and malicious actors. ClickGuard also offers detailed analytics to track the efficacy of your campaigns, as well as insights into potential threats that could jeopardize your marketing efforts.
Lunio
Lunio is click-tracking fraud software that allows you to see who is clicking on your advertisements and how many times they have clicked. It’s a great way to keep track of your ad spend and see what kind of traffic you’re getting. You can track where your ads are being clicked and use that information to create better ads and improve overall ad performance.
One disadvantage of Lunio is that it can take some time to place the tracking code across all of your marketing campaigns. Data extraction from the platform has a lot of room for improvement. Increasing the number of custom reports, data fields, and formatted reports will improve the user experience.
Clixtell
Clixtell offers a full-service solution to businesses and digital marketing agencies. Online advertisers can use call tracking, web analytics, and Pay-Per-Click fraud detection, prevention, and protection services. They can track every visitor to your website and protect your PPC ad budget by preventing any attacks on your Google Ads Campaigns and Bing Ads.
You can prevent attackers from seeing your ads instantly and automatically. And they can do it with pinpoint precision. This feature has received a lot of positive feedback.
Conclusion
This solution helped many businesses gain a clear understanding of the extent of ad fraud in their traffic. You can set Opticks to run customized reports and use their advanced tools to help gauge the true performance of your campaigns and take the necessary steps to improve and receive only the best traffic possible. Opticks can help you save a good percentage of your digital investments. It is certainly worth a good look
FAQs
How much traffic can you send into the Opticks platform?
Depending on the volume of traffic, their plans provide varying capacities for traffic analysis. If you happen to exceed your capacity in a specific area, they will comfortably invoice you for the extra volume and re-evaluate the contract if necessary.
How many payment plans are available?
They offer different payment schedules and you can pay either monthly or annually (with a 10% discount).
Can you change plans once you’re subscribed?
You can downgrade or upgrade your plan as needed.
Is there training given once signed up for the platform?
Every client receives a dedicated kick-off session, a training session, and access to extensive training material.
Does customer support come with all of the plans?
Yes. Standard support is provided with all plans. But for extra help, you would need to reach out to the Opticks team who serve various networks worldwide.
