25% of U.S. Device Identifiers Are Invalid: White Paper Released by Leading Data Exchange Platform BDEX

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (PRWEB) September 21, 2020

BDEX, the first and largest data exchange platform in the U.S., is releasing its recent findings on the impact of invalid consumer data, device identifiers, which not only misleads campaign decisions but also drains advertising budgets.

Ad-fraud, such as click-farm traffic, click spamming, and geo-masking, has a large impact on creating erroneous data. Fraud operations have been rampant for years and only continue to grow more sophisticated, bypassing some of the industry’s most nuanced filters and fraud detection practices. In fact, the Association of National Advertisers estimated 2019’s total fraudulent ad impressions were between 20-35 percent which racked up to global projected losses of around $5.8 billion.

To further investigate this issue, BDEX analysts used data from more than 100 different suppliers to cross-reference MAID, MD5, and IP addresses and compare these data points with other identifiers and location information in order to evaluate the validity and quality of the data.

BDEX found that on average 25% of device identifiers is unusable. Eliminating bad consumer data can improve return on advertisement spend (ROAS) by as much as 43%.

Other key findings include:

  • 20% of MAIDs sold in the U.S. data market are invalid
  • 21% of email MD5s are linked to more than 10 MAIDs
  • 2% of consumer IP addresses sold in the U.S. are from non-U.S. countries, U.S. governmental IP addresses, or are otherwise invalid
  • 1.1% of email MD5s sold in the U.S. are invalid

BDEX CEO & co-founder David Finkelstein recommends marketing teams implement big-data tools into their data analytics and align with firms that can provide quality-scored data, evaluated for fraudulent characteristics in order to ensure campaigns and ads are reaching real target consumers.

“Ad-fraud will continue to become more advanced, as fraudsters find creative ways to evade detection,” Finkelstein said. “However, big data has also become a robust tool powerful enough to combat it.”

The white paper is available here.