NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE) – White Ops, the global leader in collective protection against sophisticated bot attacks and fraud, today released its survey and report on benchmarking marketing fraud in 2021. 129 digital marketing executives with performance marketing responsibilities gathered insights to produce a report that assesses the industry’s understanding of marketing fraud models, the extent of these threats, and how they responded to the challenge. The report revealed what marketers are seeing and doing in this space today, and where the gaps and protection challenges lie.
Conducted by Renegade with the assistance of White Ops, the survey was completed in Q4 2020 and gathered responses from digital marketing executives in a variety of industries.
Marketing fraud involves the use of technology to falsely simulate human engagement in digital marketing campaigns to suck out money on a marketing budget. Examples of this include media purchase fraud, lead generation fraud, retargeting fraud, app installation fraud, in-app engagement fraud, and competition attacks.
“Marketers know that digital fraud is happening, but they have difficulty identifying and combating it, and the cost is significant,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and co-founder of White Ops. “We’re seeing increasing requests from marketing directors to make sure their campaigns and spending are connected to the real people they want and need to reach. Fraud is a major industry problem that negatively impacts businesses of all sizes and maturities running into the millions each year. ”
The 2021 Marketing Fraud Benchmarking survey and report supports this fact. Some key findings of the report are:
-
Two thirds of those surveyed had experienced marketing fraud in the past year.
-
More than 20% of respondents believe that at least a quarter of the contacts in their marketing and sales database are fake, fraudulent, or bots.
-
43% of respondents could not estimate how much traffic is on their website bot activity versus the people they were trying to reach.
-
33% of respondents said it was the security team’s responsibility to prevent marketing fraud, while 40% said it was the marketing team’s job.
-
While the majority of marketers (75%) are concerned about new privacy regulations, less than half of those polled regularly remove fake or fraudulent contacts from their marketing and sales databases.
Hassan continued, “Marketers need to control and take responsibility for fraud in order to protect their budgets, reputation, security practices and compliance, increase their conversion rates, increase business results and outperform their competitors.”
The report reveals additional valuable stats, top reasons for concern and hope in the industry, and tactics to stop marketing fraud and get better business results.
For more information on White Ops and the 2021 Marketing Fraud Benchmarking Survey and Report, please visit the report’s page on the White Ops website. For more information on White Ops Marketing Integrity, please visit whiteops.com/products/marketing-integrity.
About White Ops
White Ops is a cybersecurity company that works to protect global companies and internet platforms from digital fraud and abuse. We humanize over 10 trillion interactions per week to protect the sensitive data, reputation, compliance, bottom line and customer experience of our customers as their digital business grows. White Ops recently received a strategic growth investment from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division in partnership with ClearSky Security and NightDragon. Please visit www.whiteops.com for more information.
About Renegade LLC
Renegade is probably NYC’s most accomplished B2B marketing agency, having been supporting CMOs since 1996. With the wisdom Renegade gained from over 400 CMO interviews, Renegade is unique in its ability to simplify brand stories and translate them into targeted campaigns. To learn more, visit renegade.com.