A few years ago our team had an enlightening conversation about ad fraud with Dr. Augustine Fou of FouAnalytics. Dr. Fou is an independent ad fraud researcher and visionary who is on a mission to make digital advertising better. The deterministic FouAnalytics platform – which I’m pleased to announce OMI is now using – audits campaigns for fraud, using analytics to identify bots and “fake” campaign results.

In 2022, Dr. Fou estimated that many digital marketing campaigns were experiencing upwards of 30-35% fake bot activity, and that number is rising. These bots make it look like the reach of a campaign is higher than it actually is, so marketers never really get a clear picture of performance.

With Dr. Fou’s expertise and services needed more than ever today, we’re excited to partner with FouAnalytics to bolster our client campaigns with an added layer of advanced fraud detection and prevention. This will enable our clients to achieve higher levels of ROI -- because when you reduce fraud, whether it’s caused by bots or other invalid traffic, you reduce wasteful spending on ads served to bots. You also increase the opportunities to direct your marketing messages at not only real people, but also the right people.

We are in the early stages of launching FouAnalytics across our omni-channel campaigns, starting with email and programmatic ads. Working with Dr. Fou, our aim is to enable our clients to reach more targets – not bots – and more decision-makers who align with their ideal customer profile.

The FouAnalytics Platform

Here is a summary from Dr. Fou about what his platform does and how it compares to Google Analytics:

“FouAnalytics is advanced analytics for your digital ads. Google Analytics (GA) is analytics for websites. But you can't use GA to measure ad impressions. FouAnalytics in-ad tags are used to measure digital ad impressions -- e.g. where the ads went, and if bots or other forms of fraud caused the ads to load. FouAnalytics on-site tags are used on websites to measure bots and human activity so site owners can make business decisions better informed by analytics. I continue to tune the algorithms underlying the FouAnalytics platform, by reviewing active campaigns with clients and partners every day (sometimes weekends too) over the last 12 years.”

Go here for a deeper dive into how the platform works.

As marketing leaders know, the truth is in the results, and if your outcomes are falling short, then fraud should be investigated as a possible reason for lower than expected performance.

In the coming months we’ll be updating you on the results we’ve achieved working with Dr. Fou. We’re very excited about how this will benefit our clients. In the meantime, please reach out to us with any questions.