Fraud is impacting every aspect of digital advertising, with publishers, advertisers and ad tech providers all required to be vigilant in their approach to combating this problem. New figures from Adjust have found that while an average of four per cent of an apps paid user acquisition budget is typically lost to fraud, outliers have seen up to 90 per cent of their budget stolen.

Its in response to this level of danger that Adjust has developed its Fraud Prevention Suite, which combats five major sources of mobile ad fraud. The tools have so far rejected 400,000 installs, not including 200,000 SDK signatures, saving users around $2m (£1.48m) per day in terms of saved budgets.

While anti-fraud tools are an excellent way of combating lost budgets, there are also several practical steps that advertisers can take to avoid fraud. Understanding methods like SDK spoofing, click injection, click spam, fake installs and fake in-app purchases can help marketers tailor their campaigns to avoid the brunt of fraud.

Adjust has just published a new whitepaper, “The Bad, The Ugly and the Truth of Mobile Ad Fraud“, giving marketers helpful, actionable advice on understanding and combating these sources of fraud. Its available for free here, and provides crucial guidance on making campaigns more effective, as well as saving money.

“Although its advertisers who bear the brunt of fraud, poor quality attribution or technical difficulties, eradicating ad fraud is a challenge the whole industry should come together to solve,” say Adjust in the whitepaper. “Its in the interest of the entire advertising ecosystem to go after these issues. This means that publishers, advertisers, networks and attribution services should work together the help scrub the problem out of the advertising economy.”

Adjusts new whitepaper, “The Bad, the Ugly and the Truth of Mobile Ad Fraud” can be downloaded for free here