ADVSEC08-BP02 Look for opportunities to block ad fraud and enhance transparency in your advertising solution

DSP’s need to verify their advertisers and agencies are purchasing legitimate advertising inventory across potentially multiple exchanges in real time. Consider implementing an ads.txt file, designed by IAB tech labs, is designed to enable additional transparency within the advertising solution by allowing DSPs to review legitimate companies authorized to market their advertisement inventory.

Implementation guidance

Adding an ads.txt file lets ad publishers declare which services can market their ad space. Retailers can verify incoming advertisement inventory against the list to verify authenticity. This aids in fraud prevention by blocking domain spoofing threats by bad actors impersonating legitimate publishers. The file also aids in protecting DSP’s budgets and campaigns performance. Ads.txt may also aid in compliance by meeting certain criteria large advertisers require within their best practices.

Consider using Amazon S3 to host your ads.txt file for highly available and simple access. Amazon S3 allows for version control and accessible updates to the file if needed. Lastly, within Amazon S3, you can block object version deletion using S3 object lock. This defined retention period can be used as an extra layer of data protection.

Key AWS services

Resources