Bots Don't Buy: How to Spot and Stop Fake Ad Traffic with Rich Kahn

What if a big slice of your ad budget never reaches a real human? 

If you've ever stared at your digital ads dashboard thinking “the clicks are there, so why is nobody buying?” you’re not alone and you’re not crazy. You might think there's a problem with your content or creative. But sometimes the problem isn’t your offer or your copy. Sometimes it’s ad fraud, click fraud, and invalid traffic quietly polluting your funnel.

In this episode, I sat down with Rich Kahn, co-founder and CEO of Anura.io, to put plain language around a messy topic. Rich explains how fraud shows up for small businesses, what the common warning signs look like (high traffic, low conversions, leads that don’t respond, people who swear they never filled out your form), and why “good” KPIs like click-through rate can be dangerously easy for fraudsters to game. You’ll also hear how fraud can hide in places people assume are safe, including partner networks and even “organic” traffic.

Transcript

Rich Kahn and Janice Hostager-1
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Janice Hostager: [00:00:00]What if I told you that a chunk of the money you're spending on ads right now is going straight to a black hole? Not to your dream clients, not even to real people, not to Meta or Google, just bots, fake clicks, and fraud. The platforms aren't exactly rushing to tell you this, So you probably aren't even aware of it.

But If you've ever stared at your ad dashboard thinking, "I'm getting clicks, so why is nobody buying?" Then this episode is for you. Now, I wanna be 100% real with you. There are a lot of moving parts for an ad to perform well. The headline, the creative, the audience, the landing page, and of course, your offer, they all need to be aligned to get peak performance from an ad.

And we would all like to think it's an outside force when it's not working. But sometimes when an ad doesn't convert the way we expect, the answer might not be your offer. It might not be your copy or anything that's on the creative side of it. It might be that a portion of your traffic was never a real person to begin with.

Today, I'm talking with Rich Khan, the co-founder and CEO of Anura.io, which is an ad fraud detection platform that helps businesses find and eliminate the bots, the fake clicks, and the junk traffic that are quietly draining your marketing budget. Rich has 31 years in digital marketing, and he's bootstrapped five multi-million dollar companies, so he knows what he's talking about here.

And in 2023 alone, his platform identified over $1.2 billion in fraud for clients. That's billion with a B. So we're breaking down what ad fraud actually looks like for us as small business owners, how to spot it in your own data, and what you can do about it, even if you're working with a tight budget.

So let's get into it

So give me a real scenario. Now, like, not just numbers, but like tell me a story about what fraud looks like for a small business

Rich Kahn: Okay. Ah, I've [00:02:00] got a story. It's, it's not a small b- it's a mid- middle, mid-sized business, but this is kinda where it's at. Um, I met these people a couple years, uh, prior to working together, and it's because we were served on the same... I was working with, uh, one of their, uh, VPs of marketing. We, we served on the board, uh, a board together in the lead generation space, which was more like performance marketing.

And I'm like, "Hey, you know, you're buying a lot of media. You should probably spend, you know, you should probably take a look at our tool, get a free traffic quality audit. Let's see what you're dealing with." And no, they weren't seeing anything, right? 'Cause they didn't know the signs to look for. Uh, it's not like the average person wakes up in the morning and says, "You know, I need a fraud solution," right?

They don't, they don't do that, um, because most people don't realize that a lot of the problems that exist in marketing space right now start with a fraud problem at the top of the funnel, right? It's interfering. So if it, if, if you think, and let me just paint a picture for your audience. Um, last year, the global society, as a global society in digital marketing, we spent $750 billion.

Um, based on our conservative estimates, we're estimating that $165 billion was stolen by fraud. 

Janice Hostager: Wow

Rich Kahn: it's no longer a question of if you have fraud, it's a question of how much fraud are you dealing with. And the problem is most pe- so that comes out to about 22%. Um, we on average typically find, you know, when we do a traffic quality audit, we, we typically find the average person is 25% fraud, and really what it depends on is where you're buying your traffic.

You're buying it from search, social, programmatic, affiliate. It depends on, each channel has different layers of fraud. Um, so anyway, we were talking to this company, and um, for years they didn't recognize that they had a fraud problem because they didn't know what to look for. Then it became very obvious.

They lost two major clients, and the reason why they knew it was fraud is because the client said, "We're leaving you because you have fraud on your network." I mean, it was a smack in the face, you've got a problem. So I happened to just be, you know, my normal reach-out every quarter, reaching out just to say, "Hey, maybe we can get in front," h- and it was, like, perfect [00:04:00] timing 'cause it happened that same week.

And the gentleman got back to me and said, "Yeah, I, I think we have a fraud problem. We just lost two clients. I'm hearing rumblings from my team that there's other issues going on. You know, can we run that traffic quality audit?" Absolutely, let's run the traffic quality audit. We run the audit. Find out that 65% of the traffic that we scanned was fraudulent 

Janice Hostager: Wow

Rich Kahn: So let me backtrack it a second, uh, to try to give you guys a little bit more insight.

Like, okay, so if you had less than 5% fraud, it pretty much goes unnoticed. It's still eating your budget, but it, it's hard to identify that because it's such a small percentage of your overall volume. It's just, you know, it is what it is. Once you break 10%, you start to notice s- you know, the ROAS is starting to fall.

Things are not right. You know, you're getting leads and you're calling them and they don't answer, or when you get them on the phone that they tell you that, you know, "I didn't fill out your form." You know, you're starting to s- starting to see some signs. You know, maybe you have a lot of traffic and low conversions.

Um, maybe you have some weird site behavior if you're tracking that using like a Hotjar or something like that. 

Janice Hostager: Mm-hmm.

Rich Kahn: to see those signs. Once it breaks 20%, the sky is falling. You know there's a problem. You just don't, you know, necessarily know it's fraud, but these are the signs that you look at.

That's when you gotta ask yourself, "I might have a fraud problem. It's... I should do some research and figure out what's going on." That's kind of what it looks like 

Janice Hostager: Okay, interesting. So how did you get into this industry? Like, I would imagine you a kid didn't say, "I wanna," you know, "fair it out fraud." tell me how you got involved in... How did you figure out that there was a pr- that this was a, a marketable problem that people were having?

Rich Kahn: So it's funny you ask, because I, I was actually, when, when I dec- decided to do this, I actually told my, my partner that I don't wanna be the guy solving fraud. It was not the- 'cause I knew how difficult it was and how much work and time it takes. So anyway, go back, my, um, my wife and I, uh, started a, a digital marketing ad network.

So think of Google, but really, really [00:06:00] small, right? Um, we started it in 2003, launched it, and we had clients loving it because the traffic was very inexpensive, but had good conversion value. So we, you know, even though we didn't have a lot of traffic, people would buy f- they, uh, we even had clients come to us and say, "Look, you get first crack at my budget.

Can you spend X?" And we would do some estimates and say yay or nay, and they would allocate their budget to us first before they went to Google or Facebook because obviously those, well, Facebook wasn't out then, but in 2003 Google was out, and Google's traffic, very expensive, right? So they would come to us first and try to get their budget, as much as budget as we can absorb, and then they had to spend the rest of the budget elsewhere.

2004, late 2004, all of a sudden we started hearing grumblings from our clients that, hey, something's going on. The conversions are not the same, and, and we started hearing those little telltale signs that it might be a fraud problem. So I started looking at it. I'm a developer. I actually wrote my first game when I was 9.

I got published when I was 12, so I've been doing this f- for decades. 

Janice Hostager: Mm-hmm.

Rich Kahn: looked at it and I'm like, you know what? I've seen this before. It's fraud. And that's when I turned to my partner and said, "Look, I don't wanna be the guy solving fraud. Let's just go out, license a solution, bolt it onto our platform, and go about our day."

And in 2004, 2005, nothing existed. In fact, the first commercially available fraud solution didn't come out until 2008 or '9. So I said, "Well, we can either close up shop or we can solve the problem. And I said, "You know what? Challenge accepted. I can, I can do this myself." So I, I sat down, I wrote the code. I think I did it in a weekend.

Um, it was a really unique way of looking at the data and solved the problem that day. Uh, and then of course fraud evolves over time, so I had to continue evolving the code and staying on top of it. Then eventually hired a team to start taking over and h- and working on it. And then about 10 years down the road, somebody turned, you know, one, one of our, actually several of our clients were asking, they loved our traffic quality, they knew we had a fraud solution that we had built, and they wanted to license that fraud solution for other channels, 'cause they [00:08:00] were seeing fraud in other channels or things that looked like fraud in other channels.

And we're like, "I don't know if I wanna build another platform. Like, this is, it's a lot of work because I'm only supporting it for myself. I'm the only customer, I'm the only one who's gonna complain about issues. But now if I start opening this up, I'm gonna have a lot more people asking for features that I may not have in there now, or things, you know, asking for new stuff and it's just, it's gonna create a whole new business model."

And so we said, "You know what? Let's test one client." And what was interesting about this client is he was just doing organic traffic. He was doing content marketing, driving organic traffic, and the people that were advertising on his website were complaining about fraud tra- uh, fraudulent traffic. And he's like, "It's, it's organic.

Nobody's paid. Like, I don't understand." 

Janice Hostager: Mm-hmm.

Rich Kahn: So we jerry-rigged it, put it on his site to see if it would work and as a, as a test case, it worked great. We found 30% fraud on his site with organic traffic. 

Janice Hostager: Ha.

Rich Kahn: was kind of interesting. And we decided, you know what? This looks like it, this could be something different.

Like, so first thing we did was I spent six figures of my own money and I tested that solution, the solution we had built, against three market leaders that were in the space. We had access to their code, uh, because clients were using their system, so we were able to test it, um, against their co- And we found out that when performance was on the line, accuracy and thoroughness weren't on the line, we stood out.

Like, we were definitely the, the clear winner. And we ran three different independent tests that year, uh, that year was 2015. Um, and we, we actually have a, a report, a white paper on that on our website called The Year in Review of Ad Fraud, and it was 2015 where we ran all these tests. Um, so we decided, you know what?

We definitely have something that's worth bringing to market, so we spent 2016 working on it, and April 1st of 2017, we launched Anura as a standalone fraud solution. So that's how I got to where I am now. 

Janice Hostager: Yeah, yeah. That's really, that, it's really unfortunate that is such an issue And we'll and, and we'll talk more about like organic versus, uh, paid in just a [00:10:00] minute here. But is this something... A lot of my listeners are, are small businesses, like really small, solopreneur or just startups. Is this really a big company problem or is this something that's across the board that'll, can affect anybody?

Rich Kahn: it's across the board. Uh, fraudsters steal from everybody equally. Um Assuming they're buying on Google and Facebook, those tend to be the lower percentages of fraud in the industry, right? And that's usually where people start because they're the bigger companies. Um, and generally speaking, that has around 10% fraud inherently.

So I mean, it's still eating your budget. Um, but I'll give you guys a hint. If you're gonna spend, if you're gonna start off on Google and stay there initially, when you set up your campaign, you gotta go through all the details, but, and I ke- I keep forgetting where they move it. They keep moving it around.

But there's a little checkbox by default that's checked, and it said, "Include partner networks," 

Janice Hostager: Yeah. 

Rich Kahn: right? So that this way ... Because 90% of the traffic you get f- when you buy from Google doesn't come from google.com. It comes from their partner network. And in that partner network, there's name brand companies that you know and seen, um, but there's also tens of thousands of websites you've never heard of before, and that is where a lot of the fraud tends to come from because they're getting paid to drive traffic.

And of course, when you incentivize somebody to do something, cheaters find a way to cheat. So when your campaigns are small, you can get away with doing this little trick. Just uncheck that box. So this way 100% of the traffic you're buying from Google comes from google.com, and obviously google.com has no, no desire to, to commit fraud.

They, there'll be a maybe 2% fraud. It's minimal. It's something that you can live with, but it shaves off the lion's share. But once your campaign gets to a certain point, y- you're not gonna be able to get your budget spend. You're gonna have to open it up and open the network up, and then that's when you s- you start needing tools like an Anura to help you identify where the fraud is and eliminate it from your campaigns. 

Janice Hostager: Gotcha. That's true in Meta Ads too, right? They do have, their third-party, platforms that they will ask you about

Rich Kahn: Up to this point, I've been saying no, right? Because [00:12:00] Facebook generates all their traffic from their user base. 

Janice Hostager: Okay

Rich Kahn: when I, and I go, if I, when I'm on stage and I ask the room full of people, "How many people think Facebook has fake profiles?" Everybody raises their hand. We all know it. They talk about it.

Facebook is very open about they're trying to shut them down. But yet, if you ever take a look at, I don't know if people are familiar with Fiverr, you know, a great place for like, you know, little things that you can get done. Look up buying likes, Facebook likes. You can buy f- you know, 10,000 Facebook likes for like 100 bucks.

You know those aren't real profiles. So what happens is fraudsters put fake profiles on Facebook to make money indirectly off of Facebook by basically using it for other activities like buying likes, you know, selling likes on, on people's pages. But to keep those fake profiles alive, they have to make them look like real people, Right. They have to interact with ads. They have to interact with, you know, people's content, like things, comment things. They have to d- do the stuff that a real person does so they avoid getting shut down, and that's where their fraud comes from 

Janice Hostager: Okay. Okay. So what's the difference between like a, a bot, fraud, invalid traffic? Is this all the same thing 

Rich Kahn: Just different, yeah,

Janice Hostager: things?

Rich Kahn: different names. So the industry term, because nobody likes the word fraud, is invalid traffic, IVT, right? Understanding I- invalid traffic, there's two classifications of invalid traffic. So you've got, and it's all IVT, so you got GIVT, which is general invalid traffic. This is the type of traffic that's hosted by data centers, well-known bot IP addresses, things like that.

And then you have SIVT, which is where the lion's share of the fraud comes from. It's called sophisticated invalid traffic. These are your AI bots, installed software on your machine like mal- that have malware integrated in them, or human fraud forms, click forms, that people pay money to these pla- places to commit fraud, but using a human so they get past the CAPTCHAs, they get past bot detection, because they're real people.

So that's, so, so I always say the three [00:14:00] vehicles typically used to commit fraud is bots, malware, and human fraud. There might be some others in there, but they all kinda fall into those one of three categories 

Janice Hostager: So, I, what's, what's a, a sign that fraud is actually eating your ad budget? 'Cause I know that I have run... Personally, I've run ads that I feel like, I, that nothing converted or it didn't convert like I wanted it to, and I, and I've seen this with clients as well. But it's hard to know whether or not it's fraud, if it's your landing page, it's your messaging's off, your creative's off.

So how is it that we know that it's fraud? 

Rich Kahn: Yeah, it's, it, you know, without scanning the traffic, it's hard to know, right? Because there's, there's many reasons why a campaign won't perform. Ad creative, messaging, targeting, all that comes into play as if the campaign's gonna convert. But let's say you built a campaign and it's converting, so you got the messaging's right, the targeting's right, creatives are right, and everything's working well.

You do have stuff called, you know, um, ad fatigue, where the ads, you know, they stop producing results 'cause people have seen them and they just kind of blank 'em out. So you gotta constantly keep fresh ads going and different things like that. But, you know, if you take the campaign, you put it in, all of a sudden you start to see a sudden drop in traffic on a relatively new c- ad creative, could be a sign of fraud.

So I mean, the only way to know for sure if it's fraud or not is you really have to have a tool to scan it and identify, is this fraud or is it just, is it real people? If it's real people, then you, okay, I can forget fraud, I can now focus on ad creatives and targeting and all the other stuff that.

has to go with it.

But I'll, I'll give you an example. I had a university that, it's a client of ours. They were buying traffic and they had an ad agency handling all the traffic for them just so they didn't have to deal with it. And I think they suspected that there was a problem going on because they called us up, didn't tell us that they had an ad agency, um, tested our software, loved it, signed up, became a client, and then they said, "Oh, by the way, all of our campaigns are being controlled by an ad agency.

We'd like to get you guys on [00:16:00] the phone together because, you know, one of the sources is showing 90% fraud, and we've been complaining about that source, and now we know it's fraud." So we get the ad agency on the phone and what, long story short, what happened was the ad agency has been looking at certain KPIs, so key performance indicators, that tell, told them the traffic was doing well or not.

And it wasn't based on a real conversion, like somebody making a purchase, somebody filling out a form and confirming it was a real person. It was something, something that was easy, I guess, at the time for, um, a fraudster to, uh, manipulate, like click-through rate. So, and I think that was one of their KPIs was the click-through rate, how many ads are they showing versus how many people clicking on the ad.

And let's say the average is a .5% click-through ratio. What they were doing is, wow, we have some sources coming in that are performing at .7, .8, like on the higher side. Let's manage the campaign to that KPI. So what happened was those KPIs were being designed by fraudsters, so now what's happening is they're adjusting their campaign stats around attracting more fraud without them knowing about it 

Janice Hostager: Ah, 

Rich Kahn: So they had, they were making good decisions, but w- they were making good decisions based on bad data, which gives you a bad outcome.

So it got to the point where, you know, the ad agency's like, "Are you kidding me? Like, the KPIs are through the roof. Everything's great. How could it be fraud? You're wrong." And we said, "Okay, let's just, just for, um, fun, let's remove that source, shut that source off, take that budget, move it to the other campaigns that have better quality traffic, and let's see what happens with the backend conversion data, the stuff that the client really cares about."

And as soon as they did that, the client saw a spike in, in ROI. It was clear as day that, you know, our data was accurate, telling them what was going on, and now that now the agency's listening to us, so now we're saying, "Okay, let's bring the source back in. Let's optimize it around good data, and let's get that con- under control so that the client, uh, could use that as a good source of data 

Janice Hostager: That's really [00:18:00] interesting. So if somebody's running, let's say, some paid ads on with a tight budget, and they can't afford to probably work with you at this point, 

Rich Kahn: Mm-hmm. 

Janice Hostager: what are two or three things that they could do now to protect themselves?

Rich Kahn: Okay, first off, one of the things I would do is, um, if it's a tight budget, I'd probably stick with Google, 

Janice Hostager: Okay

Rich Kahn: or Facebook. All right? Those two are gonna have your lower levels of fraud. Um, and again, if you can do Google, use the little trick that I said is uncheck the box for the partner network so you can really tighten up that, that fraud.

Start there. Next thing is pay close attention to the backend conversion. Like, again, every, every, uh, uh, campaign out there is designed to con- produce some real conversion. So maybe somebody's selling a product or a service and they're generating a lead, right? So if the lead is generated, call to confirm the lead is accurate.

If it's a fraudulent lead, you're gonna know because the person's gonna probably not answer the phone, or you're gonna get 'em on the phone and they're gonna swear up and down they didn't fill out the form or they don't know who you are. 

Janice Hostager: Hmm.

Rich Kahn: Um, but you gotta be careful because if you called somebody who didn't give you expressed written consent to call 'em, you're breaking TCPA compliance.

You could be sued for that. 

Janice Hostager: Huh

Rich Kahn: In fact, that's the largest growing class action lawsuit in this country 

Janice Hostager: Really? Interesting. So bots can fill out forms 

Rich Kahn: Sure 

Janice Hostager: for not just for a, free call, but they can also fill out a form for a webinar or any other kind of form that you 

Rich Kahn: Yep.

Janice Hostager: correct?

Rich Kahn: webinar, they can sign up for a demo, they can sign up for anything that they have, the lead form. And they can use my information. Like, the bot can just go to a database which the data is readily available out on the internet for free. They can look up my name, look up the email address, look up the phone number.

They have all the information, fill out the form. Heck, I've seen bots that, you know, type, and they'll type out Richard, and as they're typing out Richard, they make a mistake, they delete the character. So they make it look like it's ... 'cause sometimes people are looking at the, the screen videos, and they're watching it in real time to see how it's [00:20:00] being filled out, and it says, "Oh, that looks like a real person."

Meanwhile, it's not Rich Kahn filling out the form, it's some bot filling out that form. So you gotta watch for all these things, but if you start getting those leads where they're like, you know, they're not real leads, you know that you're having an issue with fraud. Um, you can link it back to maybe the campaign creative, the keyword.

Depending on the targeting criteria, a lot of these platforms, especially Google and Facebook, have extreme targeting criteria, and you can dig into that, and you can start to optimize a little bit around that. Um, it's a lot of work, like it ... but again, like, I, this is my fifth multi-million dollar web property that I bootstrapped, so I understand tight budgets.

I've been tight budgeting my whole career, um, bootstrapping, so I get it, you know. But, you know, in the beginning, you work 90 hours a week, and you just do what you gotta do to get it up and running. And, and then once you start making some money, then you can start hiring people to help out with the work, Right. But in the beginning, as a solo-preneur pre- you, it's 100% on you 

Janice Hostager: How easily can we spot this on like Google Analytics? Oftentimes we'll look at where our source data is, and we can see spot or sites that we've never heard of,

Rich Kahn: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, if you're on Google, you're basically ... A- a- and again, let's say you're buying Google and the partner networks, really what the, the targeting criteria that you have control over, um, is really gonna be the, uh, the campaign, the, uh, ad group, the actual ad itself, the ad creative, the ad listing, the keyword that it came in on.

Because, um, when I first built this, uh, we were actually managing Google campaigns for clients also as one of our things. So what I ... I might have a client that had 100 keywords that I'm managing, and it would watch the keywords, and if it saw a keyword had a high level of fraud, it would just stop bidding on that keyword.

It would back off on that keyword, let, let the tr- budget go el- elsewhere. So same thing, if you have some backend conversion analytics, you're not gonna see it on Google Analytics. It just doesn't show up there because it looks real, remember? Uh, bots are designed to make traffic look real, so it's really not gonna show up there.

But when you get the [00:22:00] backend conversion and say, "Wow, it came from this campaign, this ad group, this ad listing, this creative, this keyword," you can go back and if you get a couple of, those leads coming in from that same, same grouping, then you can say, "Hey, maybe I ought to shut that keyword off. Maybe shut that ad group off."

Like, and you can start to do some optimization that way to try to get things down. Um, but that's—again it's, it's difficult nowadays, So

like when you're spending there, like I said, my ... the single easiest trick is uncheck that box. Try to keep your budget to Google and Facebook. It'll get you the lower sli- 'Cause I'll give you an example.

Everybody sees banners all over the place, video ads all over the place, Right

Those are sold in a, in a real, in a real-time bidding environment. 

Janice Hostager: Mm-hmm.

Rich Kahn: Um, so you typically buy those through DSPs. Google has their own DSP, um, which is a demand side platform. So if you're buying display units, those average 50%, fraud.

So if you have a tight budget, stay away from that.

Janice Hostager: 50%, wow. 

Rich Kahn: Yes. Stay, focus on Google and Facebook, 'cause that's gonna be around 10%. It still sucks to have to spend the 10, 10% on fraud, but on the Google side at least you can pull back on that little checkbox and really get it down and try to, try to focus on ad creatives, you know, ad fatigue, keyword purchases and targeting, all that stuff you can focus on, which is what you traditionally have to focus on once fraud's out of the way 

Janice Hostager: Right. Right. Is, do you think that AI is making everything so much worse? 

Rich Kahn: Oh, 

Janice Hostager: Or is it... 

Rich Kahn: yeah.

I'll give you a quick story on that. Um, last year, tal- Talend last year, a new AI-assisted bot came out, and it was so advanced it got around all fraud solutions in the marketplace. So it was so bad, I had a, um, one of my, um, my, actually my CRO was at a trade show, an affiliate trade show in, uh, Bangkok, and he found two companies with booths at the show selling fraudulent traffic that gets around all fraud vendors.

That's how blatant they are, and again, this is overseas, so they, they do what they wanna do. 

Janice Hostager: Yeah

Rich Kahn: thankfully, you know, o- once we identified [00:24:00] it, we quickly put together a, uh, a solution to solve it. Took a, took a minute to get it done, but once we got it launched, we're able to confirm that it's been blocking all that new AI stuff.

But again, and then we desi- the way the new design came out for our system, we, we believe we're gonna be protected for years to come based on how AI works and everything else. But it's something that you gotta watch out for, because AI, you know, bots back in the day would just basically move the mouse perf- perfectly straight, and it would be easy to catch if you're running videos and stuff like that.

AI-assisted bots, they're hard to, they're almost impossible to identify 

Janice Hostager: Hmm. And they just keep getting smarter and smarter. 

Rich Kahn: Quickly 

Janice Hostager: Yeah. So you have a tool, right, to- that business owners can test whether or not they have a fraud problem?

Rich Kahn: Yeah. So our whole thing is I'm a developer, so my goal is I w- I, you know, if I wanna work with you, I don't wanna just take your money. I wanna know that you have a problem that, uh, my software can solve. If we do, then, then I'm happy to, to, to take your money a- and, and solve your problem for you. Um, so w- first thing we do for everybody, we do is a traffic quality audit.

Um, it basically, there's no credit card involved. There's no, you know, commitment at all. It's just, hey, let's find out. Let the, let's look at the data and see how big of a fraud problem you have. Once we identify the fraud problem?

during that, that audit, we also tell you where it's coming from, and then the goal is, okay, how do we mitigate this effectively and efficiently, uh, to reduce or eliminate the fraud as much as possible using our software? 

Janice Hostager: And that, that is on your website, I would assume? 

Rich Kahn: Yeah, so 

Janice Hostager: that people can access? Yeah

Okay 

Rich Kahn: Yeah. if s- people go to our site, anura.io, they, there's a little green button up there that says either talk to an expert or a traffic quality audit, click that. You fill out a little form, we'll get in touch with you. The first thing we wanna do is find out, okay, where are you buying from?

You know, how much, you know, how many visitors a month are you, are you driving? You know, what kind of issues are you running into? You know, 'cause usually when someone clicks that button and they want a traffic quality audit, something's going on. They suspect something. [00:26:00] V- very rare is it someone just saying, "Well, I'm just curious."

Like, it usually doesn't happen. Usually, "You know what? I had a problem, things were working great, now they're not. I had an issue. I'm selling, I'm managing traffic for a client, all of a sudden they're having a problem." Something happened to trigger, 'cause, um, my CRO says this all the time, "Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, 'You know what?

I need a fraud solution.'" That just doesn't happen. Nine times out of 10, they have a fraud problem, they don't even know it's a fraud problem. So having them look up and research on the internet or through AI w- what the problem they're having and how to solve it, so we r- do a lot of content writing. So like if they're just looking for educational information, we have over 300 blogs on our site.

We're putting out blogs every week. We have dozens of c- of, uh, e-books. We have the internet's only, uh, uh, ultimate guide to ad fraud. It's like an 80-page book, e-book that talks about all kinds of fraud in all different channels and how it works, and things you can do to, you know, to try to minimize it on your own.

Um, so tons of resources. Um, we even have a YouTube channel where I'm on podcasts like this. Uh, I did three this week. Um, so I mean, it just, you know, you get invited because it's a topic that a lot of people don't talk about, a lot of people don't know. It's an interesting topic, 'cause people are curious, "Hey, if I can solve that problem and it fixes my ROI problem or my ROAS problem, makes my life easier," right?

Otherwise, they're running around chasing their tail trying to solve a problem that they don't realize, you know, the da- the way they're trying to solve it's not gonna solve it 

Janice Hostager: Yeah. Yeah. So where can people find out more about you?

Rich Kahn: So two things, um, anura.io, so it's spelled A-N-U-R-A.io. I'm sure that'll be in the show notes. 

Janice Hostager: Mm-hmm.

Rich Kahn: so they'll be able to click on that, go there. That's beautiful information. It, it's, it's more resources than any other solution I've seen out there when it comes to just talking about fraud so they can understand.

We've got a glossary and all kinds, and we've got a, we've actually got an, a, a fraud calculator, so you can actually put in, you know, check off all the different places you're buying traffic from and hit submit, and it will actually give you an estimate based on those sources of how much fraud you have.

That's a free resource that's there, which is great. [00:28:00] Um, in addition to that, uh, Rich Khan, um, K-A-H-N, on LinkedIn. I'm all over LinkedIn. I'm posting six, seven, eight times a week, just little snippets, little, you know, hey, Q and A's and things like that, talking about fraud and, and, uh, putting out resources that we, we constantly put out there.

So easy to find, easy to get more information, light touch, basically. You can, you can learn as much as you want without having to talk to anybody. You know, when you're ready to talk to somebody, we're here, but our goal is to educate the, the audience so that they know what's going on, they know some of the signs and symptoms to look for, so when it does happen and they need a fraud solution, they know who to call 

Janice Hostager: Perfect. Yes, I will second that. Your website is extremely valuable in terms of content. I, the, y- your blog posts are in-depth, they're easy to understand, I learned a ton just by going there that, more than I wanted to, because I'd like to just pretend that this doesn't happen and that all my money is going to the right place, but I know that that's not the truth in this world.

So, 

Rich Kahn: Yep 

Janice Hostager: Thank you so much, Rich. I totally enjoyed this, um, and I think we're all a little smarter now because of it. So thanks for being here today.

Rich Kahn: Appreciate you having me on today.

Janice Hostager: So I don't know about you, but I'm really gonna take a tight look at my ad results differently from here on out and see if maybe there is fraud going on. So for more information about Rich or anything we talked about today, visit the show notes at myweeklymarketing.com/161.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope to see you next time. Bye for [00:30:00] now.