Today in Digital Marketing - Combatting Click Fraud with CHEQ Essentials— Weekend Edition

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

More than 27% of internet traffic is invalid, costing advertisers billions annually. And it's only getting worse.In this weekend edition episode, Tod speaks with Lucas Rabinowitz from CHEQ Essentials about their world-class click fraud protection platform.Securing your traffic has become EssentialCHEQ Essentials operates advanced algorithms and real-time monitoring capabilities to detect and block all fraudulent sources. Implement CHEQ Essentials to protect your ads and websites, divert your resources towards human traffic and unlock your marketing activity's full potential.Visit https://b.link/gocheq to enjoy an extended trial AND a 10% discount exclusively for our listeners.This episode is a paid partnership.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

So you have launched your ad campaign. The numbers look great. Lots of clicks from all over the world. Big numbers of website visits. But when you get the sales numbers back, something's not lining up. What went wrong? Well, there's a very good chance you have been the victim of click fraud. Fake users, botnets, scrapers. There's an entire industry out there dedicated to this kind of activity. And every year, billions of dollars are lost to that click fraud. But there is a solution. Check Essentials. Their software conducts 2000 security tests in real time for each visit to your website.

And in this special paid partnership episode, we are going to dive deep into the murky world of click fraud. You can check them out while you listen at b.link slash go check. That's b.link slash g o c h e q. Lucas Rabinowitz is the Associate Vice President of Growth Sales for Check. Lucas joins me now from his office in New Jersey. Hello, Lucas. Hello, Todd. Thanks for having me. Not at all. So let's get to the kind of the top line stuff. How does Check Essentials differentiate between genuine user traffic and bot traffic? Well, Todd, differentiating between user traffic and bot traffic is what we do best. So we actually run thousands and thousands of cybersecurity tests in the background unbeknownst to the user. So you can really be

confident in whether or not that's an authentic human who might want to interact with your brand or potentially a malicious bot that's really just rotating through a list of websites. But we give you all that data and run that in the background so that there's a frictionless experience. So this is, I would imagine, I don't know, but I would imagine a combination of IP lists and maybe the way that people are clicking. Like, are you analyzing their movement through a site? Give me, I'm not asking you to, you know, obviously give me this, the algorithm code, but like, how does, how does it work?

Yeah, it's actually pretty interesting in that IP blacklists as an industry standard, that's a good starting point. But one of the things that we're doing, one of the many things is looking at potential lies that that user is telling us. Are they saying that they're somewhere they aren't? Is the time zone on their computer not matched the time zone on their browser? And those are just a few very superficial examples, but you can imagine across an entire computer system and browser software and botnet

how many different places someone could potentially leave a breadcrumb for us to find. And we check all those places, and that's why our detection is so accurate. You said there's thousands of checks in real time, eh? Yeah, absolutely. And there's thousands of different things you can look at. It can be things like those time zones that I mentioned. It could be that maybe you say you're

on Safari, but you're actually using an Android phone where that's not possible. And there's lots of different ways where you can mess this up as you're going out there with a bot, especially if you're one of these people who maybe just downloaded it off the web, made it in chat GPT, and you didn't code it yourself. You're just trusting someone else to do your fraud for you. So there's lots of different ways to leave a telltale sign behind. Can I ask a dumb question? Why do I, as the digital marketer, actually care about fake clicks? Sure, it messes with my reporting, but like what damage could it actually cause? That's an interesting question because it can cause so many different types of damage. You know, there's the obvious damage that if I pay for a fake click, that there's a

hard cost to that, especially in industries like financial services. Insurance is huge because it could be over $100 just for that fake click. And that's a really big industry for us as a result. But the other damages are more downstream. You've seen a lot of research out of places like Harvard and SAP even did some research on this topic back in 2016 about the cost of bad data. They estimated that at over $3 trillion and lots of assumptions there, but imagine not only paying for that fake click, but also all the downstream effects of the reporting and campaign optimization and all the other systems that it enters. The effects compound very quickly. And that's where people see

a lot of value from identifying it, not just in blocking the paid ad fraud, but in also preventing all the waste and damage it does to your internal systems and decision making. You know, until you mentioned optimizations, I had not even really considered that. But you're right. If you know, it's not just the reporting that we download for our marketing campaigns that that we're relying on, the platforms themselves are relying on that data. So, you know, if it sees that there's a lot of traffic, whether it's real or not, going to a particular site or page or a particular audience doing that, it will change on the fly who your campaign delivers to.

So I guess the reporting problem is used not just by us, but also by these platforms to optimize the campaign. So it could really sink a campaign. That's a very astute observation. You're absolutely right. It could not only damage your view of the truth and help you understand things better, but imagine Google and Performance Max campaigns in particular that rely on all the signals that are being sent back to Google by your campaigns. Now, imagine a world in which that was a bot clicking on that campaign and then a bot or an AI algorithm in this case on Google's side that is trying to do the right thing, but all it does is find you more bots. And this type of stuff happens all the time. It's the age of optimization and automated optimization. And that could be

pretty damaging if you're putting that black box to work on the wrong things. Yeah. So walk me through the logistics here, Lucas. If someone is using Check Essentials, how does this work? Do they install a pixel on their site? Do they change all their product links to your short link? How does it actually work? It's very easy. Nothing as heavy a lift as a product link to change. We actually just have to put a tag on the site. It's about a 10 to 15 minute setup to connect all your different advertising platforms, Google, Meta, and Microsoft for blocking actions that you might want to take. If you have a WordPress site, you can connect that for blocking actions as well.

And from there, you're up and running. You can see everything almost instantly. It's very user friendly. We start to take action on that. And so the setup's super simple. It's really all happening in the background. And so the great thing is, from a marketer's perspective, there's no impact to your user experience on the site. That's always been something when I speak to marketers about blocking, they get very scared because they don't want a user to experience any friction on their journey. And we provide them a way to be secure without being inconvenient.

Right. Can you give me an example? Like when has Check Essentials really changed the outcome of an advertiser's campaign? There's so many to think of. And one that really comes to mind is there was a particular e-commerce brand that we were working with. And part of what happens when you allow ad fraud to run rampant is it limits the reach of your campaigns. So you're not just paying for that click, but that means, Todd, you're not seeing it. I'm not seeing it. Mary Jo is not seeing it either. So there's limited revenue potential now from that campaign. And we had one company in

particular that turned this protection on and saw over 35,000 additional new users coming to their site every month afterwards once we cleaned out their funnel. That was a pretty big deal for them because they had a pretty high ticket item. There was multiple thousands of dollars per conversion. So for them, they ended up netting an extra 200K or so in revenue per month. Over the course of a year, that adds up quite a lot. And you can imagine how if you limit the reach of your campaigns, not just the money you're wasting, but all the revenue opportunities you're missing. Especially as we come into this Black Friday shopping season, we've seen over the past several years due to an analysis on over 42,000 websites

that up to 35% of shoppers during this holiday period are fake online. They're automations, they're bots, they're people trying to stuff carts and scalp items. It's a lot of different things happening all at once. I was actually glad to see an integration with Google Analytics there. Can you explain what that does? Yeah, absolutely. That's the visibility component that we're talking about. Now, if I'm a marketer and I go to my landing page and I see that it's converting at a really good rate, this A-B test is fantastic. This one converts at 5% and B converts at 3%. I make my decision. I go on my merry way. I was recently talking with a retailer who was spending months of their time trying to figure out why a new product launch

had not gone well. They were changing the positioning on the page. They were updating the copy. They even had considered reducing the price during the launch window, which is almost unheard of. But what they found out after integrating this data into their systems, like you mentioned, through a GA connector, is that one page actually had 99% bot traffic and the other page had almost zero. And so just by happenstance, they were completely optimizing to nothing. There was no problem. The B was 3%. That was their baseline. And A was actually just a lot of fake traffic. And that's really hard to see without a detection platform in place. So this visibility is really useful. And when you think about that $3 trillion in bad data expenses they talk about, it's not just because your data is skewed. It's because the average data scientist spends almost 50, 60% of their time just cleaning and normalizing

because of stuff like this that's a needle in a haystack without someone who can help you identify it. Yeah, I look for a couple of things when I'm evaluating a SaaS tool. And one of them is, can I hook it into my analytics? Of course, you've got your own on your site. But, you know, marketers do not have limitless time. And often, you know, we rely on one or two main sites, main platforms for our analytics. And so it's great that it hooks into there. You know, I mean, I've always thought in the end that all types of digital fraud, it's kind of like an arms race, right? You build protection, the bad actors get smarter,

your software adjusts, they go around it. How does Check Essentials make sure that it's staying ahead of that increasingly sophisticated scene? Yeah, the game of cat and mouse is tough and that's exactly why you need an expert partner now.

Places like Google, Meta, they put a good faith effort and they really do their best to reduce this risk for you. But you need a team of seasoned experts that know what to look for. And our entire founding team came from the Israeli Defense Forces, many of them from Unit 8200, which is an elite cyber intelligence unit. And so you're talking about decades of training from some of the best people in the world at identifying inconsistencies in the digital realm. And we're applying that know-how and that technology to this game of cat and mouse and making it available for you so that your go-to market can be protected. But that's just industry expertise and a level of training that most of us can't even fathom.

And so that's why I always recommend that people can absolutely do things to try and protect themselves. But when it comes to finding the more nefarious things out there, we're always doing that research. And that research gets pushed out to our detection in our entire network of customers, and it's a real benefit for them. But it just takes a lot of research and a lot of expertise. There's really no way around that. And a lot of ad campaigns as well are run, you know, during strange hours, strange days, sometimes weekends, and so on. You know, I mean, and it used to be that you would just work in an agency and work from nine to five. But we're often in there tweaking things at seven, eight at night. Can you tell me a bit about your support hours? Because this is always a critical thing for me. Like, can I reach someone at Check Essentials if I need help at like seven o'clock on a Tuesday night. Yeah, absolutely. We have a support team that's active right within the platform. And so we have a global distributed support workforce that's there to help you. There's a chat window right within. It's manned by real humans. We don't have bots on our site helping support you. We have real

people doing it. And we also have a world-class customer success organization run by people who have built several world-class customer success organizations in the past at places like Salesforce, for example. And so I think that you'll be very well taken care of here, which is why you see 1,000-plus five-star reviews for us on places like G2 and other review sites because our product works really, really well and we do our best to take care of our customers. So is it just evenings or is it 24-7? No, we have people around the clock, depending on the regional support, different areas, different locales. Maybe you won't get somebody on a video meeting at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, but you may be able to get a response from our chat team. And so there's different levels at different times, but there should always be somebody to help you. You folks have set up a special link to give listeners a free trial and a discount. We'll talk about that in a moment. Lucas, what kind of business do you think would benefit best from Check Essentials? Is this a tool that's,

you know, really only for the Fortune 100 companies? I think everybody who does business online needs to be at least aware of how this impacts them. And the Fortune 100s, we have a fantastic enterprise platform for them. I'm Fortune 100s, we have a fantastic enterprise platform for them. I'm not necessarily sure they're even the target for Check Essentials. We have 14,000 customers who are small, medium-sized, high-growth businesses that desperately need somebody to help protect them because 42% of cyber attacks are actually against small businesses. And so a lot of folks think that it won't happen to them, but the reality is they're often the target of these types of attacks, especially in the financial services place where we see that rate even higher. And so I really do think,

especially if you're a demand gen leader in a software company, we see people who see spikes in fake leads at the end of every month and quarter because of competitive fraud. We see the financial services industry losing hundreds of millions of dollars to these expensive fake clicks. And we see lots of other use cases along the way. But I do think that those specific industries that have very expensive advertising, we see a lot of traction there. Things like the education and ed tech industry as well, very expensive advertising with a lot of financial incentives to defraud them on their financial aid sites. So they attract a lot of IBT. And I think it's really just anybody who needs the digital world to operate efficiently for them to do business. I think it's a huge problem that affects a lot

of people. All right, Lucas, the big question, how much does it cost? That's the great part. Since our goal is to protect everybody who does business online, Check Essentials starts at a very affordable rate. There are packages that start as low as $2,000 a year. And for those Fortune 100s that you mentioned, it scales up to really complete and comprehensive protection. That's a much bigger bite of the apple, but also much more robust. And so here at Check, we pride ourselves on being able to serve the entire market

because we really do want to create a safe space for businesses to transact online. If someone's listening to this, they want to try it out for a few days before committing, is there a way to do that? Absolutely. We have a free trial available, or you can always reach out to us directly on our site or on LinkedIn. I'm sure we'll be very responsive and happy to help. And for listeners of our podcast, Check Essentials has set up a 30-day free trial and a 10% discount. You can learn more at b.link slash gocheck.

That's b.link slash g-o-c-h-e-q or tap the link in the show notes. Lucas Rabinowitz is with Czech Essentials. Lukas, thank you so much. Thank you, Todd.