Have you ever wondered how a tacky, low grade advertisement managed to climb its way onto a respected website? There is nothing quite like reading a major online newspaper and seeing an ad for “Work at home and earn $6,000/month.” Well some advertisers are finally fed up with the poor placements their ads are getting.
Alex Baydin, the former manager of Epic Advertising, has started a brand new and “more transparent” company called PerformLine. This new company has spotted a major opportunity to help advertisers better monitor where their products and services are being placed.
PerformLine and other companies are using an automated system to verify that page views and leads are real, rather than incentivized. They also look to see that sales resulting from the networks’ placement did not involve deceiving consumers and that they are located on the sites that the networks claim. According to an article in Wired.com, Ad Network Vets Now Trying to Clean Up Their Acts, the techniques used to police the ad networks will likely involve JavaScript tags, web crawlers, automated screenshot analysis and tracking pixels. Of course the last technique is only possible when an ad network wants to cooperate. But ad networks are increasingly more willing to cooperate in order to maintain credibility with their advertisers.
Credibility aside, ad networks are also increasingly nervous that if they do not begin policing their own industry, then the government will. So the incentives to adopt these techniques is obvious not just for advertisers, but for ad networks as well.
