Impression volume vs Quality — David Finkelstein // BDEX

Show Notes

• 02:00
  Impression volume vs. quality in advertising

  David's AdExchanger article stemmed from frustration with companies valuing quantity over quality in advertising. Many prioritize access to more people, but this often results in buying access to bots and click farms and the dilution of campaign performance.
• 04:14
  The relevance of impression volume in advertising

  Impression volume matters, but it's crucial to focus on quality impressions from real people to improve conversion rates and cost per conversion significantly. Eliminating impressions from bots and click farms can lead to a 100% improvement in these metrics.
• 05:30
  The issue of misaligned incentives in media buying

  The problem of prioritizing quantity over quality in traffic buying exists because media buyers and platforms profit from it. Media buyers often seek scale to protect their budgets, which makes it challenging to focus on quality.
• 06:54
  Strategies to eliminate bot and click farm traffic

  Brands are putting more pressure on media buyers and platforms to identify IDs associated with ad fraud to improve performance. BDEX has developed technology to identify IDs that show evidence of non-human activity to eliminate them from the audiences brands are building.
• 08:57
  How BDEXs technology identifies bot and click farm traffic vs. human traffic

  An AI engine analyzes 400 billion data signals monthly, including IP addresses, emails, hashed emails, and mobile IDs to distinguish human activity from bot activity. Human activities have distinct footprints that differ from bot activities, allowing for the identification of non-human IDs.
• 10:00
  Distinguishing human from non human behaviors across platforms

  BDEX goes beyond ad clicks by analyzing interactions across platforms to compare them and distinguish between real users and bots. They assess the same consumer's engagement at different times and platforms based on IP address and mobile ID.
• 11:04
  Barriers to efficient media buying

  The main barrier is a lack of education and understanding among brands, media buyers, and agencies regarding the underlying technical aspects of identity data. It requires a specific level of expertise that not everyone possesses, which is why education is crucial.
• 12:33
  Cost benefit of data enrichment for audience refinement

  The enrichment process is relatively inexpensive with platforms like BDEX. The cost is typically outweighed by the significant increase in return on ad spend, which can reach 40%-60% when using cleaned data compared to off-the-shelf audiences with potential bot traffic.
• 14:03
  The prevalence of click fraud in advertising channels

  This is an issue happening across social, the open web, and increasingly in CTV. One of CTVs biggest problems is its limited inventory, and this incentivizes fraudsters to create more inventory at scale to drive more opportunity.
• 15:06
  Shifting away from impression volume in media buying

  While there was a trend toward CPA-based buying in the past, cookie deprecation and data privacy changes are making it difficult to accurately track where impressions came from vs. conversions. As a result, the CPM metric will continue to prevail.