CEO Monthly Reflection March ’23
Blog | March 23, 2023
Since 2020, the awareness of Fraud’s prevalence in Survey Research has exploded. This is highlighted by the announcement this month of a multi-association effort around helping Researchers & brands tackle this rising issue.
While the awareness of the issue is a nice progression, the pendulum may have swung too far to the fear side. I wanted to give you some comfort with a summary of where we see things in the survey sample ecosystem.
- Yes, Fraud is ubiquitous, and the biggest vendors are vulnerable.
- No, Fraud isn’t taking down the whole ecosystem.
- Yes, DIY Insights Platforms are particularly vulnerable to more fraud.
- No, your insights aren’t based on fake data.
- Yes, some fraud breaks through even the best fraud mitigation tools.
- No, not all bad quality is directly attributable to “fraud”.
Essentially, fraud trails ad-tech by a few years in fraud as well. So, in 2023, survey sampling has caught up to the digital ad fraud trends. Based on a recent overview published in Statista, fraud was estimated to be 11% of all global ad traffic in 2019. In 2022, that “invalid rate” hit 13.2%. This is consistent with OpinionRoute’s measurement of the online sample ecosystem across its network. We measured about 12% of traffic as fraudulent in 2022.
Here’s my point- fraud has been here a while. But we as an industry have tools to proactively combat many of the methods bad actors use. At OpinionRoute, we’ve been building technology solutions in data quality for a decade. As our client, you can take comfort in the fact that you have a partner who is rising to the challenge. Anything the associations create will be icing on the cake.