Verifying impressions, fighting bots and cheating in live broadcasts

The problem 

Cheating with integrations impressions and using bots for click fraud in the chat is a common problem in the world of Influencer marketing. Streamers and Influencers use click-fraud to be more valuable for sponsors and increase their revenue from live streaming services. A chatbot is also a very common phenomenon that aims to mimic viewers' engagement in the chat and increase creators' revenue through CTR (click-through rate) cheating. As the creators and customers base grew, the Uplify service was unable to scale its business due to the increased scope of the problems described. 

Where did it come from? 

Uplify is a platform for automated sponsorship integrations placement and sponsorships in live streams that allows brands to reach the creators' audience in a programmatic way. That brings transparency, scalability and efficiency which is currently absent in the influencer marketing market. 

With Uplify, it's possible to show sponsorship integrations directly during broadcasts from the tier 1 streamers and select the most effective channels with relevant audiences. Every creator registered on the platform has information in his profile about the number of unique viewers, audience coverage and click-through rate (CTR). CTR depends on the number of views and clicks on the link in the chat during the stream. According to these indicators the advertiser can choose on which channel the ads will be the most effective and with which creators he wants to cooperate. But creators have learned how to bypass the system, to inflate coverage and CTR.

There's a solution

The Uplify team closely monitors integrations on the platform and helps sponsors sort out the analytics after the integrations placement is complete. In some integrations campaigns, the difference between clicks and impressions recorded on the platform and on the sponsorships side was up to 20%, which is a significant difference that you can't just ignore and cite as a statistical error.

To solve this problem and ensure that brands meet KPIs, the Uplify team introduced fingerprinting for each viewer who watches the live broadcast and for each user who clicks on the chat link. The technology works by analyzing user behaviour patterns and browser data to create a unique visitor identifier that can link click and other patterns of fraud to specific viewers.

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Thus, at least 95% of unfair impressions and bot clicks are eliminated and the brands gets better quality traffic, saves the budget and achieves the planned results, while the rating and number of available integrations impressions for unscrupulous streamers decreases. In case of repeated violations, streamers are blocked in the system.

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Fingerprinting technology allows Uplify not only to block fraudulent actions of creators but also to determine the number of unique viewers for each creator, adjust the frequency of integrations impressions per viewer and estimate the audience overlap between different creators.

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Uplify is the first service in the livestream-market that uses this technology on a large scale and verifies impressions. We see that this revolutionary approach in the integrations market already has a positive response from brands and is reflected in the efficiency of partnership integrations.

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Pavel Medvedev, Uplify Development Director