How CJ Delivers the Industry’s Best Network Quality & Anti-Fraud Protections

Trying to start a conversation about partnership fraud is a lot like getting people to discuss life insurance—everyone knows it’s important, but they’d rather avoid it.

Still, it’s a conversation we need to have to protect our businesses. More importantly, we must take action to make sure we have the best protections in place, whether you’re an advertiser or a trustworthy publisher.

This comprehensive article presents the challenge of fraud in the performance marketing industry, gives a detailed overview of CJ's multi-layered approach to fraud protection, and provides key takeaways for both advertisers and publishers.

The Fraud Challenge in Performance Marketing

Every marketer wants to protect their brand and investments from value-stealing efforts. While one can argue that partnership is one of the “cleanest” digital media sectors, there are still plenty of fraudsters trying to make off with your money. Research shows fraud costs our industry more than $1.4B every year.

Fraud is theft, and it’s in everyone’s best interests to detect, mitigate, and prevent it. Less fraud means more money in every good actor’s pocket—be they an advertiser, publisher, or creator. Networks and tech platforms like CJ, with their extensive view of the partnerships ecosystem, need to lead the charge in improving program and traffic quality for the benefit of all stakeholders. We take that responsibility very seriously.

This article provides a high-level explanation of our approach, how it’s unique, and why it’s so effective at detecting and mitigating fraud.

Key Takeaways

CJ spends millions each year to monitor, detect, and stamp out fraud, keeping advertisers and publishers ahead of these ever-evolving criminal strategies. These significant investments add enormous value to every industry stakeholder’s bottom line.

For Advertisers

• Multi-Layered Protection: We use a multi-layered approach that sets us apart from competitors. The formula to our success combines proprietary AI and machine learning models, designed specifically to detect fraud, with the industry’s largest team of network quality experts. This strategy delivers superior detection and mitigation, creating unmatched value for everyone in our network. Our ongoing investment in skilled personnel and cutting-edge technology is key to our success.
• Freeing Up Money for Growth: Working with CJ is an investment in security and growth. Thanks to our cutting-edge fraud detection technology and expert team, we offer unparalleled protection for your assets. We save advertisers an average of 5% more by catching more fraud than others. That's 5% more money to cover program fees and reinvest in what matters most: legitimate and profitable partnerships. For some advertisers, this investment could amount to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars!
• Partner with Confidence: While 1 in 10 publishers outside the CJ ecosystem face significant quality violations, our platform boasts a pristine ecosystem. When you partner with CJ, you're not just choosing a platform–you're choosing peace of mind and unparalleled value.

For Publishers

• More Growth for Responsible Publishers: Our advanced fraud detection technology and dedicated team weed out bad actors, encouraging advertisers to invest more with you. By catching fraud and saving advertisers an average of 5%, we're freeing up more investment to support your growth.
• Investment in You: CJ is a partner invested in your success. Our commitment to cutting-edge technology and expert human intervention means your efforts are constantly safeguarded and supported. With CJ, you're not just a publisher—you’re a part of a community that prioritizes integrity, quality, and mutual benefit.

Leading the Way in Network Quality & Anti-Fraud Protection

Since we started in 1998, CJ has always prioritized network quality and anti-fraud measures, setting us apart from competitors. While other networks had lax onboarding processes, we built a massive Network Quality team to carefully review every new publisher. This commitment attracted the world’s most valuable and quality-focused advertisers.

As the internet has grown and evolved, so has our approach. We’ve added the industry’s most advanced fraud detection and mitigation technology alongside our strong team of experts. We’ve invested millions in network quality and compliance solutions, constantly refining our processes (with hundreds of updates!) to guarantee the highest level of fraud protection.

Our biggest takeaway from the past 25+ years is that a single approach isn’t enough to tackle an industry issue as persistent and insidious as fraud. Success stems from a multi-layered strategy, ensuring the best results for both brands and publishers.

Beyond Just Tech

While other companies eventually recognized the need for strong fraud protection and adopted low-cost, tech-only solutions, we took a different route. There are plenty of third-party platforms and tools that detect the probability of fraud, and many of them are valuable. However, our extensive experience in fraud protection led us to develop a more comprehensive strategy that drives measurably better results.

CJ’s Multi-Layered Approach to Fraud Protection

To deliver the best network quality, CJ focuses on two core forms of protection:

AI and Machine Learning Fraud Signal Detection Models

Our Data Science team has developed advanced AI-powered models that use cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to spot complex fraud patterns and anomalies. We apply these models to every aspect of partnership activity. Here are a few examples:

• Publisher Fraud: Identifying and preventing black hat publisher-perpetrated fraud.
• Pixel Spoofing: Detecting when malicious actors try to impersonate legitimate users or entities.
• Payout Anomalies: Identifying unusual or suspicious patterns in payout data that could indicate fraud.
• Redirect Abuse: Targeting the misuse of redirect links to mask traffic origin.

These models (and many others) are always working to protect our advertiser, publisher, and creator clients. By leveraging the unique strengths of each model, we've created a multi-pronged defense system that offers comprehensive protection against a wide array of threats.

Our models continuously learn and adapt to new threats before they can affect your results, ensuring high accuracy and effectiveness. They also incorporate contextual awareness, recognizing the unique characteristics of each publisher and the varying nature of fraud across different regions. Here are the core components of our approach:

Contextual Awareness in AI Models for Fraud Detection

Our AI models excel at understanding information in context, leading to more accurate fraud detection. What might be normal for one publisher could be suspicious for another, so having granular contextual awareness is crucial. Our AI model analyzes various contextual cues to make the best-informed decisions:

• Publisher-Specific Fraud Protection: Every publisher is unique, with its own traffic volume, device usage mix, and target audience. Some sites attract high traffic, while others have niche audiences. Visitors might use desktop, mobile, or tablet devices and each site caters to users at different stages of the buying journey. Our AI model recognizes and adapts to these unique attributes, ensuring effective fraud detection tailored to each publisher and website.
• Global Fraud Intelligence: Fraud isn't the same everywhere. Different countries and regions experience different types and levels of fraud. Our AI model recognizes this diversity and adapts accordingly. By analyzing data on a geographical level, CJ identifies and addresses fraud patterns specific to each location. This targeted approach ensures our fraud detection strategies are effective and relevant, no matter where the fraudulent activity originates. This is especially valuable for clients with international programs on CJ.

Adaptive Learning for Enhanced Fraud Detection

Our proprietary AI models are constantly evolving to fight fraud. They stay ahead of emerging threats by continuously monitoring performance across all our advertiser and publisher clients and incorporating analyst feedback on flagged cases to retrain the models with new data. This adaptive learning, combined with custom tailoring, delivers superior fraud detection.

Supplemental Third-Party Data to Strengthen Fraud Detection

Third-party data is crucial in our AI models' fight against fraud. By integrating information from external sources, our models get a broader perspective, enhancing their ability to detect evolving patterns and anomalies. This adaptability is essential in the ever-changing fraud landscape, where fraudsters are always tweaking their tactics. Integrating third-party data makes our fraud detection models even more effective in safeguarding our client’s investments.

Every CJ client benefits from the breadth and depth of our footprint. By monitoring hundreds of thousands of campaigns across various dimensions, we can identify more bad actors and neutralize new fraud schemes before they become a significant threat.

Explainability for Transparency and Trust

Our fraud detection AI models are not only accurate—they’re also fully transparent. They come with “explainability” features that show exactly what factors and patterns triggered a fraud alert. We want to build confidence in our AI-powered fraud detection solutions by making the decision-making process clear. This transparency helps investigators understand why each decision was made, which builds trust in the system and ensures fair outcomes for all advertisers and publishers.

Data from all programs across our network and various third-party anomaly detection platforms are incorporated into our proprietary AI and machine-learning models to assign a “fraud probability score” to each publisher. A high score might suggest confirmed fraud, but we always dig deeper before taking action. We never want to remove or blacklist a partner if there are legitimate explanations or if they have genuine intentions to deliver value.

Renowned Network Quality Experts

This is where CJ’s dedicated team of network quality experts steps in to analyze data from our fraud probability dashboard and investigate potential issues. CJ handles all the nitty-gritty of mitigation, which saves clients time and ensures highly-trained fraud detection experts examine each issue. The CJ Network Quality team reaches out to partners, works together to make changes, pauses individual publisher programs if needed, and stops fraud in its tracks. We remove deliberate bad actors from the network, while partners with good intentions get help to identify or rectify problematic operations.

Value for Brands: Maximize Impact for Every Marketing Budget

We firmly believe brands shouldn't have to pay a premium for a safe and reliable network and that your solutions partner network or platform should handle fraud protection. At CJ, our industry-leading network quality and anti-fraud services are included at no extra charge for every client.

Our approach makes a big difference for advertisers and publishers. When new advertisers join CJ, we analyze their existing partnerships to make sure every dollar is being spent wisely. Shockingly, across hundreds of programs onboarded annually, an average of 5% of publishers in our clients' previous programs are flagged for fraud. Even worse, these new-to-CJ brands were unknowingly giving 9.3% of their budget to these bad actors! By partnering with CJ, brands get access to our multi-layered network quality and anti-fraud protection, allowing them to redirect these resources to legitimate publishers who drive real growth.

Value for Publishers: More Investment

Too often, fraud discussions focus solely on how advertisers benefit from better protections, but reputable publishers gain just as much value. Our advertisers have almost 10% more money on average to invest in programs with quality partners thanks to our fraud-free environment. A clean network helps every good actor in our industry grow!

Compliance Solutions for Highly Regulated Industries

Many industries face high levels of government regulation. Keeping your program in line with these rules is crucial for providing a great customer experience and avoiding legal trouble.

To meet these needs, CJ offers an optional service called Program Compliance. This service adds extra safeguards to make sure your marketing programs meet all regulatory requirements. Our compliance experts can provide more details based on your industry or vertical—just ask your CJ account team for more info.

Conclusion: Building Trust Through Network Quality & Anti-Fraud Protection

At CJ, we believe a strong foundation in network quality and anti-fraud protection is key to the growth and vitality of the performance marketing industry. We're committed to leading the way by giving clients the most robust safeguards and assurances. Our comprehensive solution helps advertisers, publishers, and creators benefit from safer, mutually beneficial relationships.

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