21 December, 2022
Demonstrating online impressions is key for media to show their reach and to attract investors and advertisers to their projects. These impressions can be counted as Likes, Views, Subscriptions, or Followers. For websites, Google Analytics is commonly used to track such visibility and online presence over web traffic.
Ad fraud is a very profitable business that aims to deceive advertisers with fake ads or traffic. By faking online visits (impressions), there is plenty of money to be made. Audience size and location have an impact on how much an advertiser is willing to pay for specific impressions. A website with good readership will find better deals and interested advertisers.
But what happens if all these online impressions – likes, views and even the way Google Analytics works- can be manipulated?
This is the story of a “Marketing Service” from New Born Media in Kosovo, who was caught using “fake traffic” when selling a newsletter service to Nacionale, a local media that wanted to reach a wider audience.
This is also the story of how we traced SparkTraffic, a traffic generation service that promises “natural looking” traffic and up to 10 million page views per day. SparkTraffic has been around for almost a decade and is known for faking Google Analytics statistics.
But most importantly, this is the story of how views, likes, followers, subscriptions and dozens of tools that we trust to measure our audiences are abused for profit.
It all started off with a long Swedish breakfast with the editors of Nacionale.com that were visiting Stockholm a few months ago. The Kosovan news site suspected that they had been scammed by a local digital advertisement company (New Born Media) and asked Qurium to investigate how it was possible.
Nacionale had signed up for a “newsletter” service with 170,000 legitimate users to whom their news letters were sent to. However, the journalists started to become suspicious since the traffic statistics showed signs of automation, and the vast majority of visitors were new users instead of returning users.
The investigation took a sudden turn when Qurium discovered that New Born Media was using SparkTraffic to generate “fake traffic”. However, the “fake” traffic seemed to vanish into thin air as it never reached the webserver hosting Nacionale, only their Google Analytics account…
How is this possible?
Welcome to the flourishing industry of fake traffic and boosted Google Analytics!
Qurium forensics report: Looking Inside of the Website Traffic Con
Contacts
Digital forensics: Tord Lundström <t@virtualroad.org> Technical Director
Media: Clara Zid <info@virtualroad.org> Media and Outreach Manager