Hey everyone, I've been scratching my head over this lately. Just last month I was helping a buddy's small creative shop tweak their display and native campaigns—they're a tiny team handling maybe five clients max—and we kept seeing weird spikes in clicks that converted to zilch. Super frustrating when budgets are tight. Where do you guys think the biggest gaps still are in fighting fraud for those kinds of smaller-agency native and display runs? Like, is it mostly around spotting sophisticated bots in programmatic setups, or more about lacking access to decent transparency tools without breaking the bank? Would love to hear what you've run into in real life.
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Man, that situation with your friend's shop sounds way too familiar. I've dealt with similar headaches running a few side campaigns for local businesses. The sneaky part for smaller outfits is how fragmented everything feels—you're often stuck relying on whatever the platform or cheap DSP gives you, and those basic filters miss a ton of the smarter invalid traffic that mimics real users. One thing that's helped me a bit is digging into placement-level controls and blocking junk sites early, which you can check out more on https://www.chadathainorman.com/ if you're curious about streamlined ways to handle that. Nothing fancy, just my two cents from trial and error—transparency still feels like the weakest link when you don't have a big team or budget for third-party auditors.