We listened to our publisher’s feedback and built Report This Ad to improve ad quality and combat certain ad types. Now, with just a click, publishers can report detailed information about unwanted ads to our Ad Quality team.  

What is Report This Ad?

Report This Ad (RTA) was a joint effort built by Freestar and our ad quality partner, Confiant. When RTA is enabled, a “Report This Ad” link will appear below every ad unit. This link allows website users to report any ad they deem malicious or inappropriate and allows Freestar to investigate the ads based on the information provided. 

How does it work?

When the RTA feature is enabled, Freestar will display a “Report This Ad” link below every ad unit. Clicking this link launches Confiant’s Ad Reporter modal box, where users can give more information about the problem – for example, if the ad contains offensive content or is playing sound. Confiant collects this information, along with technical details from the creative itself, and provides this data on all reported ads to the Freestar team.  

Our Ad Quality Support team can access this information to quickly and efficiently track and block the source of the unwanted ad.

How should I use Report This Ad?

It’s important to know that this product is not enabled for every publisher. Rather, Freestar enables RTA for publishers sensitive to ad quality and needs an easy way of reporting unwanted ads to us. If you feel this product would benefit you, please discuss it with your Customer Success Manager or email accountmanagement@freestar.io.

Report This Ad is most useful as a tool for you, the publisher, to report bad ads to us, your Customer Success team. Because the tool gathers technical data about the creative, it allows us to troubleshoot more effectively than we could with just a screenshot. However, please keep these important tips in mind:

• When submitting your report, please include a detailed description of the issue in the dialog box.
• Please still send us that screenshot! RTA captures helpful data, but it does not capture an image, and we still need this for our investigation.
• Please let your CSM know that you have reported an ad so that we know to retrieve that data for our investigation.
• Please remember to use RTA! This tool is most effective when used by you, the publisher so that we can ask you any follow-up questions.

Report This Ad can also be used to collect reports from your users. However, remember that many website users are not specific about why they are reporting an ad and are often just complaining about ads in general. By default, Freestar does not monitor user complaints for this reason. If you would like to monitor your user complaints or receive data about user complaints, please be sure to arrange this with our Customer Success team.

Why was this product built?

As previously mentioned, we built this product in response to publisher feedback. The Report This Ad button is an essential feature for publishers sensitive to certain types of ads, specifically broken/poor ad experiences, brand suitability, competitor ads, etc. 

Without this feature, it would take significantly more manual effort to investigate and attempt to recreate the issue the publisher has reported. Freestar wants our team to be able to quickly ascertain the cause of the unwanted ads and make actionable decisions to mitigate any impact on publisher earnings. 

Questions?

If you have any questions about Report This Ad, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email accountmanagement@freestar.io. They can help you determine if Report This Ad is a feature needed on your site(s)! 

The post Improving Ad Quality with Report This Ad first appeared on Freestar.

A blocklist is a list that details what type of advertisers or ad categories a publisher does not want to appear on their site. This can be for any number of reasons but most often because of brand safety, user experience and/or legal compliance. 

More often than not, publishers use blocklists to prevent specific categories of ads from appearing on websites or apps that they deem inappropriate or unsafe for their users. Publishers have a responsibility to their online community, and blocklists can help prevent any unwanted ads from appearing on their website. 

Benefits of using Blocklists

We work with a number of ad-sensitive publishers that prioritize the content and quality of ads our partners deliver across their apps, websites, and e-commerce sites. Whether that’s blocking your competitors from advertising where your customers shop, or keeping adult-targeted ads from populating on a website geared towards kids – Freestar has the quality control to safeguard brand safety, all while ensuring monetization opportunities are not lost. 

Using a blocklist in ad tech can offer several benefits for publishers, including:

1. Improved ad quality – By using a blocklist, publishers can ensure that no bad or malicious ads appear on their website which can negatively impact their user experience.
2. Brand safety – Publishers can avoid displaying ads that are considered objectionable or harmful or is considered a competitor. This helps to protect the publisher’s brand from association with content that may not align with their values or image.
3. Increased user engagement – By avoiding displaying unwanted ads, users are more likely to have a more positive user experience and engage with ads.

How do Blocklists work?

A blocklist can block specific advertisers or brands, or it can block entire categories of advertisers. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) maintains an industry standard list of advertising content categories. Freestar uses these categories as the basis for our publisher blocklists, and we will ensure that they are mapped appropriately to each demand partner’s blocking capabilities.

Freestar has the knowledge and expertise to help curate site-specific blocklists by category and brand. Freestar has several options for blocklists when onboarding a new site: Default, Standard, or Sensitive. 

• The Default Blocklist includes Non-Standard and Illegal Content, as well as auto-play sound type ads.
• The Standard Blocklist includes all of the above plus items that are age-specific, like alcohol or dating. 
• The Sensitive Blocklist includes all of the above plus additional blocks that users can be more sensitive to seeing, like religion or politics.

What are the drawbacks of a blocklist?

A blocklist does not guarantee 100% of the ads displaying on a publisher’s website will be brand safe. On the occasion a ‘bad’ ad does get through, our team is on hand to help investigate the bad ad. Any information you can provide will help in our investigation, so please provide as much of the following as possible:

• Screenshot of issue, preferably in hi-res PNG format
• Advertiser or brand
• Clickthrough URL or landing page
• URL where it happened
• Date and time of issue
• Device, browser and OS
• City/state/country where it happened
• HAR file if possible

Our Ad Quality team will investigate this and determine which demand partner it came from and how we can minimize it from occurring again. For our more sensitive publisher, there is the option to activate our ‘Report This Ad’ feature which allows a user to provide real-time feedback on any ads they encounter that might not be a great fit for the website.

The other drawback of a blocklist is ad performance. By blocking specific advertisers or categories, publishers may impact ad revenue. However, some publishers find this tradeoff worth it especially if brand safety is a top concern. 

Key Takeaways

Freestar works with ad quality partners who are focused on delivering better ad experiences, and keeping up to date with ad-blocking trends around the world. Our dedicated Customer Success team are always ready to work with your team to find a tailored solution that fits your needs best! If you have any questions,  please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email us. 

The post Blocklist 101 first appeared on Freestar.

Ads play an important role in the experience of a website user. Ads are meant to catch a user’s attention and seamlessly flow within a webpage, but more often than not, they can be intrusive. Ad quality is an ongoing, industry-wide issue. Malicious actors, in particular, wait for opportune times to catch unsuspecting users, and their actions impact everyone in the ecosystem.

A time or two, you may have scrolled a web page and seen a bad ad. To clarify, “bad” is subjective. What one publisher considers bad may not be the same for another. A bad ad can contain anything from offensive or inappropriate content to competitive brands. At the worst end of the spectrum, bad ads may contain malicious code that hijacks a user’s browser or redirects them to questionable domains. Bad ads aren’t meant to be part of the user experience and can deter an existing or potential customer.

Overall, bad ads are bad for business. A user’s experience, particularly if it’s an unenjoyable one, can be reflective of their perception of your brand. Bad ads can scare current users away and prevent you from attracting new ones. Forget sharing or tweeting that article they just saw or even old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Ads are a revenue stream that allows publishers to offer their content without a subscription or paywall, fostering an open web, but only if they are good quality ads, contributing to a good user experience.

How Freestar Prioritizes Ad Quality

At Freestar, we know that you prioritize ad quality, and here’s what we are actively doing to protect you. 

1. Implementing Blocklists
   
   Freestar offers several options for blocklists when onboarding a new site. A blocklist is a list that details what type of advertisers or ad categories a publisher does not want to appear on their site. This can be for any number of reasons but most often because of brand safety, fraud concerns and/or legal compliance.
   
   We understand that publishers are worried that their website will be negatively impacted by the ads that appear alongside their content that don’t align with their values. Freestar offers publishers the ability to implement blocklists to prevent bad ads from being served. 

2. Strong Demand Relationships
   
   Freestar has direct relationships with all of the major Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) in the industry, and we have the volume of scale to have a strong voice with these Demand partners on behalf of our publishers.
   
   We work closely with each SSP to ensure they are serving ads only from sources that we trust and approve of. When we see unwanted ads coming from one of our SSP partners, we can escalate through our direct contacts and get timely resolution, making sure our blocklists are enforced.

3. Supply-Path Optimization (SPO)
   
   Put simply, SPO reduces the number of intermediaries involved in the ad chain and increases the level of transparency. Freestar works directly with several Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), which means that we are getting ad creatives directly from the source.
   
   One benefit of SPO is that it reduces the chances of bad actors infiltrating the supply chain. You can look at it like a game of telephone, where a sent message is very different from the message that is eventually received. When your ad goes through multiple intermediaries, it is vulnerable to manipulation and infiltration from malicious actors. Perpetrators of bad ads often search for different entry points where they can deploy their tactics. You can improve ad quality by optimizing your demand-side to supply-side platforms and reducing the number of entry points where bad ads can enter.

4. Real-Time Monitoring
   
   Freestar partners with Confiant as part of our ad quality solution. Confiant is our defense against the fraudulent advertisers who are trying to victimize your users with phishing scams, virus downloads, and other security threats. Confiant scans ads in real-time, and if a malicious ad is detected, they prevent the ad from serving on the page—protecting both the user and the publisher. The cybersecurity team at Confiant is continually monitoring the industry and updating their blocking triggers as more threats are discovered. 
   
   Confiant also provides an extra layer of protection for our blocklists. Their real-time scanning can detect and block any brands or categories that are slipping past Freestar’s existing blocklists, and it provides us with data to see where these blocks need to be shored up.

What makes ad quality difficult for publishers is a bad actor’s persistence. Short of turning off ads, there is very little that publishers can do to prevent bad ads, unless they can find good demand sources or an ad management solution (like Freestar) to work with. What makes it hard for the ad tech industry is that bad actors are continually generating new malicious creatives, new malicious code, and serving from new domains, so that they are very hard to recognize and very hard to keep up with. As soon as one bad creative is blocked , a new one is created that will get around your blocking rules.

Freestar’s strategy for ad quality goes beyond implementing ad monitoring software. Our ad quality team at Freestar further analyzes the data from Confiant, determines where malicious ads and security threats are coming from, and uses this information to make decisions about the demand sources and creatives that we allow to serve on our platform. We also work with our demand partners to remove bad creatives from their platforms. Advertisers or buyers that cause frequent issues are blocked from our network completely. This approach creates a better experience for everyone (end users, publishers, and advertisers), because only high-quality advertisers are allowed to bid on your inventory in the first place. 

Blocking low-quality buyers helps Freestar stay a step ahead of the malicious advertisers attempting to buy through these routes. It doesn’t matter if they create new campaigns—they have no access to our network. Freestar also uses this data when deciding what DSPs to form direct connections with, ensuring that we maintain high-quality demand.

Freestar takes ad quality seriously, especially how it affects the publishers we work with and their users. From SPO to monitoring and maintaining blocklists, Freestar wants to ensure we’re maximizing ad revenue and improving yield. We care about our publishers’ users because we know you rely on their readership. Advertisers benefit when they are able access your inventory without competing against bad ads. When the ad ecosystem runs efficiently, everyone’s a winner. 

The post Bad Actors, Bad Ad Quality, and just plain Bad UX first appeared on Freestar.