The likes of Programmatic Advertising changed the face of Mobile Advertising with making things go hassle-free in between DSPs and SSPs. But as every beginning, this one wasn’t the bed of roses either as fraudsters and scammers spoofed the Ad inventories with damaging both the publishers and advertisers. This unauthorized sellers disguising as the authorized ones banked $19 Billion in the year 2018.
The Ads.text initiated by IAB already came back as a quick and simple solution to such Ad frauds on the web back then. Up the next In-App Ads.txt works on a similar methodology for mobile App and OTT publishers. At the same time, the ultimate functionality remains the same with letting Programmatic Ad buyers connect with the legit Ad inventory sellers or resellers only.
What’s the Difference in between Ads.txt and App Ads.txt?
As mentioned above the methodology and functionality stays almost the same between Ads.txt and App Ads.txt. The implementation of it is different somehow as App publishers usually lack a dedicated website/URL for each of their App. It’s mostly because they have dozens of Apps on their credit and mostly a Google Play or App Store serves all their needs.
It should be noted here that Ads.txt has a compulsion to get uploaded on the website/domain, whereas the latest update enables App Ads.txt to be uploaded on App’s listing page via metadata tags too. This way the buyers or the Ad networks simply crawl App store listings to get hands-on the Ad inventory approved sellers and resellers.
How App Ads.txt is worth uploading for Publishers?
Adding Ads.txt is on the publishers to make sure they didn’t leave the advertisers in the lurches while they are eyeing to buy Ad inventories. In case developers miss out on App Ads.txt, some publishers might think they are too shady to spend money on. So, App Ads.txt is more of a signal making publishers look legit in the eyes of advertisers. This equally helps the direct partners and resellers of the publishers.
How to use App Ads.txt files for Mobile?
- Setup your Ads.txt file: Add Unique Publisher IDs of demand partners and label them as ‘Direct’ or ‘Resellers’ as per their role.
- Update the Ads.txt line of your Ad Sources: Ask your direct Ad sources to send in their Ads.txt lines.
- Upload the file: Name the file as ‘app-ads.txt’ and publish it on your developer website.
- Provide Website URL in the listing: The buyers will crawl through your listing to obtain the App-Ads.txt file to know about authorized inventory sellers and resellers.
What makes In-App Ads.txt important in Programmatic Advertising?
The In-App Ads.txt pushes to empower the App Advertising against Ad forgery that has been splitting headache among the stakeholders for quite some time now. Though it isn’t conclusive enough to curb this issue, still it has got a handful of reasons to be talked about in Programmatic Advertising.
Here’s what Ads.txt have done previously
- Lower Ad Fraud Rates: The Ad fraud was marginalized to 22% from what it was 10% back in Q1 of 2018.
- Google Crawler Friendly: The tech giant crawls 99% of websites with having set ads.txt on them.
- Programmatic Advertising Websites Favorite: Programmatic Advertising Website were quick to accept it with 77% of them uploading them on their websites by the end of 2018.
