Fraud mitigation at enterprise scale: How a major digital marketing agency with $50mm in annual spend saved hundreds of thousands and safeguarded their strategy using automated notifications and budget overspend protection.
Highlights
The situation: a high-performance ad agency wakes up to a significant hack
Recently, a performance advertising agency with $50 million in annual spend discovered $180,000 in overspend occurred overnight. A hacker had infiltrated their MCC and deployed high-budget campaigns. Even worse, the hacker also implemented automated rules to re-enable the campaigns with $99k daily budgets.
With thousands of active campaigns, identifying the source using traditional manual approaches would have been like finding a needle in a haystack.
However, because the agency runs ad campaigns through Fluency, they quickly identified the source of the hack. Fluency’s Overspend Protection features first alerted the agency, then Fluency’s client success team helped the agency design a solution that pinpointed the hacked accounts.
The response: Pinpointing the issue and implementing a long-term prevention strategy
Having an automation system constantly monitoring their data proved valuable. This agency had previously instructed Fluency’s automation to do two specific things.
First, they had instructed the system to monitor and update budgets to keep everything pacing towards their overall target for the month. Second, they had instructed Fluency’s automation to pause and lock down campaigns that exceeded their target spend limits.
Those two settings took what otherwise would have been a runaway train and put it back on track. These campaigns did spend—and quickly—but Fluency’s automated systems stepped in and locked them down. The system also alerted both the Fluency team and the agency about these abnormal spending patterns.
But the hacker wasn’t done. They used Google’s Ad Scripts to attempt to reactivate the unwanted campaigns. The scripts would reactivate and, within minutes, Fluency deactivated the campaigns again. This script signaled another point of vulnerability within Google Ads to the agency.
“This incident could have cost us hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in ad spend,” said one of the agency’s executives. “We also would have lost at least a week trying to solve the problem in-house.”
Fluency and agency agreed upon a bigger solution to tackle the campaign reactivation scripts. Together, the teams removed all hacked campaigns and unapproved scripts, fully plugging the broken dam.
Without Fluency, it would have taken hours or days to resolve this problem during a time when every moment counted.
After the dust settled, Fluency and agency collaboratively designed more advanced fail-safes and alerts that monitor and identify unwanted scripts, off-property ad clicks, and unexpected budget/spend jumps. These improvements will certainly provide even more robust protections going forward.
“Without Fluency, it would have taken hours or days to resolve this problem during a time when every moment counted,” said one of the agency’s C-Suite executives. “Instead, we could quickly contain the issue and implement new safeguards to prevent future risk.”
The impact: preventing hundreds of thousands of potential damages
Without automation, the team estimates it would have spent “days” trying to solve the issue by inspecting every account, one by one. Fluency’s Digital Advertising Operating System cut this response time to minutes, drastically reducing the agency’s financial and operational risk.
The agency originally implemented Fluency to help them manage their complex AdOps workflows so their team could focus on strategy and client results. This hacking incident validated their investment in Fluency, delivering measurable savings alongside the peace of mind from having the right team by their side.
“Our agency’s industry-specific expertise and deep understanding of the nuances of paid media are what set us apart,” said the agency’s Head of Paid Media. “Fluency enables us to stay focused on delivering strategies and client value by handling the operational complexity and risk at scale. Incidents like this demonstrate that they are a true partner dedicated to our growth and success.”
The agency also credits Fluency’s client-first support for drastically reducing the hacker’s impact on their operations and finances. The agency’s team had a direct line of communication with Fluency’s client services leadership, who promptly began investigating the alerts and exploring solutions as soon as the system notified them.
