Case Study TextNow

Case study

What is TextNow?

TextNow is a free texting and voice calling app that lets people text and call without signing up for a wireless plan. Everyone needs a phone, but not everyone can afford wireless plans that seem to rise with every year.

TextNow enables anyone with a working smartphone to access unlimited calling and texting in the U.S. and Canada, for free. Users can also access subsidized data plans on the Sprint network and low-cost international calling to more than 230 countries.

Scalarr-TextNow Partnership Timeline

Audit and trial phase.

Rejection of fraudulent installs.

Growth in traffic quality and ROI.

Detection of new types of complex fraud.

Results summary.

Audit and trial phase

Fraud types

8.1% Classic Click Spam

2.3% Bots, Device Farms

28.5% Smart Bots

61.1% Modified Click Spam

Traffic quality

36.2% Fraud installs

63.8% Quality installs

Based on the deep-dive analysis of TextNow’s daily traffic, the first round of analytics showed anomalies and a high percentage of fraud, which meant severe potential losses for TextNow.

Rejection of fraudulent

55 291

Fraudulent installs

55 291

Total installs

46 536

Rejected

$53 314

Refunded (% from total ads spend)

Growth in traffic quality and ROI

Successful rounds of reject negotiations led to significant savings in the form of refunds and overall growth in traffic quality.

Fraudulent installs decreased to ~2-3%.

Detecting new types of complex fraud

Fraud installs Dec 2019 - Jan 2020

Our unsupervised AI engine detects new fraud types.

Complex VTA Spoofing is the criminalistic practice of spoofing clicks as impressions. Fraudsters have found a haven in view-through attribution (VTA) since it is typically overlooked and considered safe.

Essentially, fraudsters take advantage of these circumstances to spam clicks as views, with the goal of stealing organic traffic.

Traffic cleanup results

Publishers Total

12 017

Sub Publishers Total

159 714

Installs Total

11 238

Fraudulent Total

92.96%

Traffic Quality

6 Month results

Direct savings

$115 000

Detected, rejected, and refunded by Scalarr.

Indirect savings

$793 000

Estimate amount of fraudulent traffic spending if fraud levels remained the same.

Conclusion

Right off the bat, Scalarr’s Analytics and Data Science teams discovered anomalies and a serious share of fraud during the initial trial and audit phase with TextNow.

While some fraud types like Click Spam were practically non-existing after a successful round of reject negotiations back in August 2019, new types of fraud like Smart Bots and Complex VTA Spoofing made an appearance.

Scalarr’s powerful engine of multilayered machine learning algorithms were capable of detecting anomalies in their early stages, effectively reducing the amount of illicit traffic. As a result, over $790,000 were saved on fraudulent advertising in a 6-month period.

Quote from our customer

Jun-Jul

2019

Aug

2019

Oct-Dec

2019

Jan

2020

Jun

2019

Aug

2019

Jan

2020

Jan

2020

Fraud is a scary subject for many new marketers. It can be tempting to look the other way and just accept any good looking ad traffic as legitimate but a company that wants to survive in this highly competitive industry needs to be vigilant. We are confident in our partnership with Scalarr that can delivery high quality real users for the company’s portfolio of apps.

Tyler Cooper,

Head of User Acquisition at TextNow

Scalarr.io detects up to 40% more complex fraudulent traffic.

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www.scalarr.io [email protected]

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