Study: Ad fraud highest in SG amongst brand safe markets

Singapore and Japan have been ranked as markets with the highest ad fraud rates in desktop display. Singapore, for example, posted the largest ad fraud increases in this category, pushing its respective optimised-against-ad-fraud levels up by 0.9% to 3%. According to Integral Ad Science's Media Quality Report for the first half of 2021, this is the highest worldwide.

Viewability on display environments in Singapore witnessed a dip, with desktop display dipping 7.3% to report 62.5% and mobile web display at 56.8%. However, on mobile app display, viewability jumped 8.7% to 74.9%. According to IAS, this makes it one of the most viable environments in Singapore.

Meanwhile, although Japan's ad fraud rate dipped by 0.2%, it still remains the second-highest globally at 2.6%. The ad fraud levels for both markets exceeded the 1.0% global average. Japan's viewability rate dipped from 57.4% to 54.8% on desktop display, going below the global average of 69.5%. Japan's mobile web display viewability dipped by 6.5% to 45.4% compared to the global average of 64.3%. According to IAS, Japan still had the highest ad fraud rates in mobile web environments, with display reaching 2.3% and video reaching 2.9%.

IAS SVP APAC, Laura Quigley, explained that to reduce brand risk from their inventory, Singapore and regional advertisers are strongly encouraged to closely monitor and optimise against fraud by utilising pre-bid tools to target away from unsuitable environments that don't meet their brand values.

On the other hand, Asia Pacific as a whole has been ranked among the top brand safe markets for desktop display. Vietnam, India and New Zealand were ranked among the top brand safe markets globally for desktop display, resulting in global brand risk to drop by 1.8% year-over-year to 2.4% in H1 2021. Vietnam's desktop display brand risk was 0.6% while India reduced its risk from 2.2% in H1 2020 to 0.8% this year. This was followed closely by New Zealand at 1.3% and Singapore at 1.4%.

In India, mobile campaigns had more viewable impressions in H1 2021. Viewability on mobile web display increased 1% annually to 58.9% in H1 2021, while viewability on mobile in-app display increased from 51.3% to 54.1%. Global display viewability dropped 2.4% on desktop and 3.3% on mobile web year-on-year, reaching 69.5% and 64.3%, respectively. The worldwide reductions were driven by drops across Asia Pacific, with India registering a 7.2% drop to post 54.9% viewability in desktop environments. According to IAS, desktop and mobile display environments in India showed significantly higher viewability rates in programmatically traded inventory than publisher direct inventory.

Meanwhile, Australia also registered the highest desktop video ad completion rates as well as the lowest drop off (-10%) of any market worldwide. By contrast, the US registered the lowest video ad completion rate of 90.1% for the first quartile, with a 13.6% drop-off to average 76.5% full ad completions during the same period. 

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Photo courtesy: 123RF

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