Case Study: SmartNews achieves a 160% ROAS increase and minimizes ad fraud risk with Spider AF

How Ad Fraud Countermeasure Minimized Risk & Improved ROAS by 160%

SmartNews, a Tokyo-founded news app with over 50 million downloads, faced rampant ad fraud when scaling CPI (cost-per-install) campaigns — internal logs showed roughly half of installs were fraudulent and a new CPI test had about 90% fraudulent installs. Concerned about wasted spend, limited whitelist reach, and ad fatigue from narrow distribution, SmartNews sought an ad fraud countermeasure and trialed Spider AF’s ad fraud detection tool.

SmartNews integrated Spider AF, using its CTIT-enabled dashboard and agency-facing support to quickly identify and exclude fraudulent traffic; the team now spends about 10 minutes a month reviewing alerts while the ad agency handles remediation. With Spider AF in place they eliminated large volumes of fraud, reduced costs, scaled CPI campaigns, recalculated CPA including tool cost, achieved a 160% increase in ROAS and an 85% 30-day retention rate for non-fraudulent installs.

SmartNews

Takashi Amitani

Marketing Manager