What is General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) 

The least harmful form of invalid traffic is general invalid traffic (GIVT).  This traffic is not intended to be malicious or fraudulent and is generally conducted by known industry bots and web crawlers from benign sources. Of course, this definition and usage could change in the future. The most common forms are search engine crawlers, data centers, or proxy traffic coming through a virtual private network (VPN). GIVT does not simulate human behavior and generally does not generate fraudulent revenue, thus, it is currently not categorized as fraud or mobile ad fraud. 

However, there can be several potential negative impacts from GIVT if not monitored and accounted for accurately. For example, not accounting for this increased invalid traffic can altere publisher data, and affect their measurement analytics. For example a sharp increase in website traffic might seem like the result of hard work and SEO, however, it might actually be due to GIVT traffic such as web crawlers. 

Luckily, GIVT traffic patterns are easily identifiable due to their simplistic nature and can often be filtered out. Such filtration methods can be regularly using lists and/or standardized parameter checks.

What is Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)

As one might guess, sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) is more sophisticated and therefore, more difficult to detect. The general calling-card of SIVT is that it is a genuine attempt from fraudsters to generate revenue through fraudulent traffic. As such, the patterns of SIVT tend to be more difficult to detect as it often avoids generating simple patterns that may raise a red flag.

This is an evolving form of traffic, as fraudulent traffic is constantly being updated to evade detection. Thus, detection, analysis, and prevention requires multi-point corroboration/coordination, sophisticated analytics, and substantial human resources.

Different Types of SIVT

SIVT can take many varied forms that often lead to different types of ad fraud, such as mobile ad fraud. Additionally, fraudsters constantly evolve to evade detection. Some common forms and methods of SIVT include adware, malware, spiders and bots that mimic human traffic, fraudulent incentivized promotional traffic, hijacked devices and sessions, invalid proxy traffic, falsely represented sites that present themselves for legal purposes, cookie stuffing and more.

Essentially we can think of SIVT as a wide array of methods that fraudsters use in order to deceive advertisers, publishers, MMPs and ad networks into seeing the fraudulent traffic as genuine. This often leads to mobile ad fraud, attribution fraud, and other cybersecurity threats. Such invalid traffic has contributed to the estimated losses in H1 of 2024, which is forecasted to have cost advertisers $84 billion in 2023 according to AdFixes.

GIVT vs. SIVT: The Differences

GIVT is benign and generally harmless. The intent is not malicious, although there may be some negative effects such as altered data and potentially misled business decisions and analytics. In fact, not all GIVT is bad. Search engine crawlers, which is one of the most common forms of GIVT is the building blocks of search engines and is partly responsible for search engines being able to find your, and other websites. Thus, they perform a necessary task.

SIVT, contrastingly, is intentionally bad and fraudulent. The aim is to generate fraudulent revenue from this invalid traffic. Thus, SIVT will often attempt to mimic genuine or human traffic in order to evade detection. For this form of invalid traffic, it is best to employ third-party providers to deal with this. 

Why Does Fraudulent Invalid Traffic Exist

Invalid traffic exists as people profit from it. If there was little gain, there would be little incentive. The most common incentive is the fraudulent revenue generated from ad fraud. This exists on both desktop and mobile ad formats. Often when it comes to desktop or web ad fraud, publishers may fraudulently inflate their website traffic and clicks in order to receive better ad revenue from advertisers. 

Various cases have often been reported in the media. Recently The International Business Times India was caught again falsely inflating their views. Thus, there must be a considerable benefit if a branch of a reputable publication is willing to risk its brand credibility for the sake of invalid traffic. Furthermore, this risk was taken more than once. Bearing in mind, that brand credibility is the lifeblood of news-outlets. Additionally to this, numerous platforms that service web ads have policies against this, such as Google Ad-sense, and your publisher account can get banned for such activity, such as invalid traffic. 

On the mobile ad fraud front, there too is much to gain. SIVT is generated in order to imitate genuine installs and post-install actions. This, of course, all leads to fraudulently generated revenue for the fraudster is successful. Some of the most common forms of mobile ad fraud are click spamming, click injection, SDK spoofing, bots, and emulators and incent abuse. 

Final Thoughts on Invalid Traffic

Although many might be new to this topic, this practice is not new. Perhaps you might be a budding e-Commerce business, that is just discovering ad fraud, and wants to get a handle on it. Unfortunately, invalid traffic generators can have years of experience and results. AdAge estimated that for every three dollars spent on digital advertising, one-dollar is lost to ad fraud. Invalid traffic is responsible for a large portion of these forecasted losses. Additionally, businesses should consider GIVT when making business decisions based on such data points as web traffic, as this can be falsely inflated by bots and web crawlers. 

The post Types of Invalid Traffic (IVT): GIVT vs. SIVT first appeared on AppSamurai.

What Are Playable Ads?

It is a process in which you have to create a scale down version of your app by ensuring that it contains all the essential features. This is to give users access to try and test the app before buying it. So, playable ads help users to gain access to a sample app before installing it.
Nowadays, playable ads are the most powerful tool for marketing. Some people are finding them useful because they help increase engagement. There are multiple applications of playable ads, and we’ll discuss them in the later sections. Do you know about Google snippets? They give insight to users about what’s inside the blog post. Similarly, the app snippet encourages users to install the app.

Why Playable Ads?

The best use of playable ads is to advertise mobile games. They’re used on other mobile games to get the attention of a player base. In this way, you can target an audience that enjoys mobile gaming. Now the days are gone when you were able to create a static image to gain customer attraction.

If you want to give users a better insight into the product, you need to create playable game ads. The best thing about these ads is users can try them before buying or installing the app.

How to Create Playable Ads?

Many people want to know how to make playable ads. The answer is playable game ads creation requires knowledge and experience of programming. Moreover, it also requires creativity and detailed strategy for creating an attractive ad that can increase engagement. Key features and exciting visuals should be at the forefront of the ads.
Remember, avoid using false buttons just to get more downloads. Retention of users should be the primary goal. You can create playable ads in two ways:

1. Interactive Video

In this approach, the developers integrate the video footage with HTML code. The interactive video can be the best choice if the playable ads are 3D or cinematic. Remember, this approach requires heavy files and can cause a high network strain when you choose this approach.

2. HTML Video

In this approach, developers create playable game ads from scratch. The intent is to replicate the in-game user experience with HTML code. It is more accurate and the best way to increase engagement.
Before choosing any approach, you need to find out the best route for your game because some games have restrictions on playable ads when using HTML. They want the file size to be small. Furthermore, in the second approach, you get more control because you build an app from scratch. It will be time-consuming but can produce some excellent results.

Html 5 Playable Ads

This type of ad captures the user’s attention by providing entertaining and unique content. Now, you can build custom playable ads for your brand. You can pair HTML 5 playable ads with app descriptions or icons to get the user’s attention. Use HTML 5 playable ads to increase conversions rates, CTR, and install rates.

Facebook Playable Ads Specs

By following the below-given specs, you can successfully run an app campaign:
• The ads must be responsive because they’ll be played on different devices
• The extension for a  playable game ad should be in “HTML or htm” format
• Playable game ads should be in portrait mode
• The playable ad code must be in JavaScript
• The file size shouldn’t be more than 2 MB
• Ads must avoid any HTTP request
• There shouldn’t be any redirect
• Add a playable source file
• Redirecting to an external network is prohibited
• Be creative and customize your ad before placement

So, after following these Facebook playable ads requirements, you can run an app campaign without any hassle.

Facebook Playable Ads

If you want to promote your mobile app or game, then you need to create a Facebook playable ad so that users can review your app by watching ads in News Feed or Facebook stories.

How to Create Facebook Playable Ads?

Another critical question is how to create Facebook playable ads? Do you also want to know the process? If yes, then keep reading this guide.
• First of all, you need to create a campaign. For this, you need to go to Facebook Ads Manager.
• While selecting the campaign objective, click on App Installs.
• Before uploading the Facebook playable ads, you need to select the app. For app selection, you can either use the app URL or name.
• Find players and customers interested in your game and increase conversions.
So, this is how you can create Facebook playable ads.

Creating Playable Ads

Well, now your concepts about playable ads must be clear. Let’s discuss the best practices for creating playable ads.

Use Simple Ads

Never assume that the user will be familiar with your game. The best approach is to consider the users ignorant of your game. When the ads pop up over a game, there is a strong possibility that the user is seeing it for the first time. They don’t know whether it’s worth trying or not.
Users can test your app within 30 seconds with playable ad games when you use intuitive and simple mechanics. When you keep it simple, you get results. Simply put, the tutorial should be simple and clear to understand how to play the game by just watching the 30-second tutorial. Your Call-to-Action (CTA) button should be simple so that they can quickly understand.

Make Interactivity Apparent 

When a user sees your image, it should be clear that it isn’t static. As mentioned earlier, the days of relying on such ideas are gone. Now, you have to create interactive ads. The ad should be clear so they can understand what they must do.

Promote Further Engagement 

How can you measure or promote further engagement? Ideally, you can do it by calculating the number of downloads. If your ad isn’t appealing and the user feels that features are useless, there is no chance that the user will take action.
The best approach to get the desired results from playable game ads is to start the download process with entertaining stuff and end the process with an inspiration quote. It can be an exciting feature or other mechanics that can force the user to take action.

Optimize Your App Store Entry

If your goal is to increase conversions, then this step is crucial. You can change the title and description and use screenshots to optimize your app store entry.

Add Game’s Feature

Perhaps it’s the best thing you can do to make your ad valuable. Ensure that your playable ad is the highlight of your game. No doubt, you need to create a simple version of a playable ad, but still, you can make it attractive and valuable by giving insight into features.

Use animations and screenshots of features so that users can easily remember your game. By adding animations, you can make your ad unique.

Timing Is Important

No doubt, playable ads give users insights into your game, but they can’t help them compare your game’s experience with others. So, the timing of ads plays a crucial role. When you don’t place ads at the right time, you won’t get results.
There should be a CTA button to convince the user to take action. If the user moves on without taking action, then your ad is useless. You need to spend time at this time and test the ad timing. When you optimize the CTA, you get the desired results.

Showcase Your Ads Interactivity

Some ad formats are not interactive, so what will you do in this case? In this case, it’s the user’s responsibility to interact with your playable ads. If you don’t do this, you might lose a potential customer.
You can attract users to take action in the first few seconds, but when you use a static image in that time, you miss the trick and lose users. Therefore, it’s crucial to use engaging visuals and animations to make your ad’s interactivity evident.

Optimizing Playable Ads

When you create playable ads, you can sit to see results. You’ll have to optimize them to get results. It’s crucial to improve the click-through rate, and you can do it by A/B testing. In A/B testing, you’ll have to create multiple variants of playable game ads. After that, you’ll expose them to your target audience to see which ad variants produce the best results.
After identifying the best ad variant, you can then use it for a large group audience. No doubt it will be time-consuming and expensive, but it can give your conversions in the end. You can do A/B testing in 5 steps for optimizing playable ads.

1. Develop a Hypothesis 

Developing a theory is difficult unless you analyze and research the data. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand your audience’s interests. This will help you choose the correct variable for testing.

2. Divide Your Audience

You can get the best results from A/B testing when you divide your audience into two groups. But ensure that the audience has the same behavior. When the audience is both groups will be similar, you can test the variant’s impact quickly.

3. Analysis 

As mentioned in the previous step, you’ll run two campaigns to see which variant performs better after dividing the audience into two groups.

4. Make Changes

To get desired results from playable ads, you need to make changes based on the above analysis.

5. Develop and New Hypothesis and Repeat the Process

This time you will choose a new variant and develop a hypothesis and repeat the process. It will ensure that your playable ads games are effective and you can get conversions.

Final Thoughts

No doubt playable ads can be time-consuming and expensive to create, but they have shown some good results in the past. They have made their name in the game sector, and we expect them to do the same in other sectors in the coming years. If you still have any questions regarding this guide or related to playable ads, you can use the comment section to reach us.

The post Beginner Guide to Creating Playable Ads first appeared on AppSamurai.