• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, November 8, 2017

While the online advertising industry as a whole is struggling to deal with programmatic ad fraud — among many pressing concerns — firms and platforms are also touting their own efforts to stamp out illegitimate ad impressions.

This week, PubMatic, which operates a sell-side platform for digital publishers, is putting some skin in the game to woo advertisers, with a money-back guarantee for any fraudulent impressions.

The money-back guarantee is available to PubMatic’s demand-side partners, backed by PubMatic’s global inventory quality team, along with proprietary processes to uncover questionable impressions. Advertisers won’t have to pay for any impressions delivered by PubMatic’s supply-side partners via its programmatic platform that are determined to be fraudulent.

Any advertiser that sees fraudulent traffic will receive a credit to demand partners on PubMatic. 

PubMatic also delivers daily reporting reviews to publishers that participate in its SSP, helping them identify potentially sources of digital ad fraud and develop a plan of action to eliminate the illegitimate traffic. If the publisher fails to do so in a certain amount of time, PubMatic will temporarily remove the account.

In addition to the money-back guarantee for ad fraud, PubMatic reiterated its support of the IAB’s ads.txt initiative, which aims to combat fraud by giving content owners and distributors the ability to identify authorized sellers for their inventory.

This is just the latest in a series of moves by PubMatic as it seeks to keep pace with a fast-changing media landscape. Earlier this fall, PubMatic announced that it was joining two other SSPs, AppNexus and Rubicon Project, to begin offering publishers a more streamlined header-bidding option for at Prebid.org. 

In June, PubMatic announced an integration with Amazon Publisher Services enabling Amazon publishers to add PubMatic as a demand-side partner. The integration means publishers have a choice of implementing PubMatic’s OpenWrap header bidding solution or adding the company as a monetization partner through Amazon’s cloud-based header bidding solution, Transparent Ad Marketplace.