Richard Kahn
PACE ACX 2022 is over, but it’s never too late to learn more about consumer consent, how to deal with ad fraud, and other important consumer engagement topics for contact/call centers. At the event, the Anura team was the top sponsor and we shared a presentation about ad fraud and some of the challenges of setting up lead generation forms.
If you missed the expo this year, don’t worry! Here are a few highlights from PACE ACX in Nashville to keep you in the loop so you can improve your lead generation and consumer engagement efforts while minimizing the risk of falling victim to ad fraud:
What Is PACE ACX?
You might be wondering “what is PACE ACX, and why should I care about it?” PACE is an acronym for the Professional Associations of Consumer Engagement while ACX is an acronym for Annual Convention and Expo.
As PACE states on their website, their annual event: “helps businesses identify and utilize the industry’s best practices with educational programming and opportunities to explore the latest technology and engage with the brightest minds in the industry.”
During the event, various industry experts and sponsors like Anura provide keynote presentations on topics like industry compliance, technology, and more to help those in the consumer engagement space improve their results.
Ad Fraud Info and Other Lessons Shared at PACE ACX
On Monday, October 10, I joined a presentation alongside Koby Hastings, Founder & CEO of Leadrilla and Christine Reilly, Partner at Manat, Phelps & Phillips, LLP to discuss ad fraud and online lead generation forms.
Our goal with this presentation was to highlight the risks posed by ad fraud, some of the challenges of creating effective online forms that generate leads, and how to fight ad fraud to enhance your lead generation and compliance.
Here are a few of the insights that were shared during the presentation:
1. How Common Is Ad Fraud?
Ad fraud is extremely common in the consumer engagement space. Companies often use online ad campaigns to generate leads for their call/contact center teams (or subcontractors, as the case may be). Unfortunately, one out of every four leads comes from a fraudulent source.
Actually, the rate of fake leads can exceed one in four for some organizations because of issues like bot fraud. Some sources estimate that “42% of internet traffic comes from bots.” Bots are automated programs built to carry out specific tasks. Not all bots are malicious in nature—but enough of them are that they create a severe lead generation fraud risk.
Form bots, in particular, are a scourge for consumer engagement teams. What these bots do is fill out lead generation forms on a company’s website using either fake or stolen consumer information. The goal of these bots is to give credit for generating a lead to the human fraudster behind the bot—allowing them to collect money from the victim in exchange for the “leads” they’ve sent over.
Why are form bots a scourge for contact centers and the businesses they work with? Aside from wasting ad budget on leads that will never convert and wasting contact center agents’ time, these fake leads create a risk of TCPA violations.
TCPA, or the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, is a regulation that limits how businesses may contact leads—requiring some form of written consent before allowing a company to reach out to consumers by phone.
The problem is that when a bot fills out a form with stolen information, the person that data is about hasn’t actually given their consent. So, when consumer engagement teams and sales reps reach out to them, it’s unsolicited contact that could result in a complaint or, in extreme cases, a class action TCPA lawsuit.
TCPA violations can cost a significant amount of money—between $500 and $1,500 per incident just for the TCPA fines. The more fake leads you try to reach out to, the larger the loss you face.
2. Making Web Forms Accessible
One of the challenges of dealing with ad fraud—and lead generation fraud from bots in particular—is stopping bots without impacting the accessibility of the form. Accessibility is a huge issue for lead generation. After all, if someone can’t fill out the form, then they can’t become a lead.
People with disabilities may have an especially difficult time with filling out online forms. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “61 million adults in the United States live with a disability.” This is about 26% of the population, or just over 1 in 4 people.
Of course, not all disabilities impact a person’s ability to fill out online forms. Someone with a restricted to a wheelchair due to lower-body paralysis may not be too impaired in their ability to use a computer if that’s their only condition. In fact, mobility-related disabilities are the most common, affecting 13.7% of U.S. adults according to the CDC. However, those with cognition, vision, and other disabilities may struggle with standard forms—and especially anti-bot tools like CAPTCHA tests.
For example, say a person with color blindness is faced with a CAPTCHA test requiring them to pick out an image with a specific color—like “click on the image with the red balloon.” Odds are they won’t be able to reliably pass the test because they can’t tell what colors are in the images presented. Or, say a person with dyslexia is presented with a scrambled text CAPTCHA test. Their condition already makes it extremely difficult to parse regular text—the alphanumeric scramble could be nearly impossible for them to organize properly.
This is why accessibility of online forms is enormously important for lead generation efforts. Forms need to follow ADA compliance guidelines and be compatible with the technologies and tools that people with disabilities use to interact with the world wide web. It’s also why you need to use ad fraud solutions that can seamlessly detect bot activity without impacting the user experience of your website.
Don’t Let Ad Fraud Hurt Your Business!
So, what can you do to stop ad fraud in its tracks without hurting user experience and locking out nearly a quarter of the adult American population? Since CAPTCHA tools can hurt the user experience (and fail to block bots in the first place), it’s necessary to find a better alternative.
This is where a dedicated ad fraud solution can help.
Anura’s ad fraud solution can accurately spot bot activity on your online forms in real time—weeding out the fake traffic with over 99.99% accuracy. This helps you protect your ad budget from fraud without affecting the accessibility of your forms in the least.
Better yet, the Anura ad fraud solution gives you control over your data. You can see exactly why every interaction was flagged as fraudulent. This way, you can confront the fraudsters directly if you need to or remove them from your marketing programs.
Stop ad fraud cold. Protect your business. Get a reliable ad fraud solution now!
