How to Spot (and Stop) Fraudulent Ad Traffic Before It Drains Your Budget

Hi, I'm Stephen Brown with LedgerGurus, and with me today I have Kurt Bell from Dash.fi. Kurt is the Director of Enterprise Sales at Dash.fi, and we're going to talk about advertising refunds, or even more importantly, how to avoid them.

Kurt, thanks for joining me.

0:25 Kurt Bell

Yeah, Stephen, great to be here. I've been looking forward to this and appreciate you making time.

0:30 Stephen Brown

Tell us a little bit about your journey to ecommerce, how you got into this part of the industry. Give us your background.

0:38 Kurt Bell

Yeah, happy to. So I've been in the ecommerce sales space for about coming up on six years, since 2020. And I kind of fell into it by happenstance, to be honest.

I was fresh into the software sales scene, was working at a different company here in Utah. And someone I had gone to college with at Weber State had just started a new SMS marketing platform for the ecommerce scene called Via SMS. So they brought me in, first five or six employees, to help build up the sales team there, scale it to about 120 people. It was a great experience.

1:15 Kurt Bell

And more than that, I just fell in love with working directly with founders. And so I ventured out of ecom after that for a year and just missed it way too much. So when I met Zach Johnson, our founder here at Dash, and had the opportunity to come back, that was about two and a half years ago, and haven't looked back since. Just love the opportunity to deal directly with founders building cool businesses and get to work directly with them.

1:33 How common ad fraud is, and why the platforms miss it

Stephen Brown

Now, the reason I wanted to have this conversation, I met one of your colleagues, he told me about what you guys were doing, and I wasn't aware of the issues around ad refunds. I have been aware about the issues with shipping, but ads, I want to dig into this.

So how common are refunds or issues with ad accounts?

1:54 Kurt Bell

Yeah, it's more common than you would think, Stephen.

I think what's interesting as we speak with brands, the overall sentiment is that their ads are running incredibly efficiently. They've put protections in place. They don't believe they'll have a high volume of bot traffic, fraudulent traffic, invalid traffic coming from their Meta and Google ad campaigns.

But it's been interesting as we've gotten into it and have 100 clients plus on this platform of the AdPay Protection, that the average is in between around three to four and a half percent of a company's spend is being wasted on fraudulent or invalid traffic. And so it's more prevalent than companies think.

2:32 Stephen Brown

And is that what most of this is, bot traffic, fraudulent traffic? Is this where the problem spend comes from?

2:41 Kurt Bell

Yeah. Without getting too far into the weeds, there are about 40 different data points that we're looking at as a company. But essentially it comes down to bot traffic, click farms, and also it can be as simple as out of geo, where you're targeting people specifically here in Utah but you're seeing traffic come in from Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, et cetera.

And so really we're looking for the parameters you've set in an ad campaign, the traffic that's coming to your site, does it fall within those parameters or does it fall outside of it?

3:10 Stephen Brown

Got you. I actually have a story, I'm sure you have one too.

But I had a big customer, they had their Facebook pixel get taken over by bots. And this was about a year and a half ago, their ad spend just started to deteriorate, deteriorate, deteriorate. They started digging in and figuring out what was going on. And when they got in, the ROAS was just terrible.

3:40 Stephen Brown

They ended up deciding, I wasn't super involved, but they ended up deciding to start a new pixel. Which was a nightmare. So they had to completely reboot, retrain it. It cost a lot of money. They didn't really lose sales, but they had a huge loss for about a one to two month period while they were pushing to get that pixel retrained.

So I have seen, I guess, what you're describing. But it sounds like this is common at least on a smaller scale with a lot of brands.

4:03 Kurt Bell

Yeah, correct.

I think the idea is, it's a product where we hope the amount of fraudulent traffic coming to their website decreases over time. That's our hope. We don't want companies to continue to have high percentages of fraudulent traffic. The hope is that by the solution we've come up with to help solve for the problem, as well as Meta and Google, these companies making edits on their end and adjustments to help prevent it, that ideally that number decreases over time. That's the end goal on our side. It's not to profit from the fraudulent traffic. It's more to provide a solution that solves for it.

4:36 Stephen Brown

I have a big question as you think about this, and maybe you'll have the answer or not.

But Meta and Google, these guys are huge. They have huge technologists. They have AI. How in the world are they not filtering out this fraudulent traffic automatically? Do you guys have any idea why that happens, or is it just a big black box?

4:56 Kurt Bell

I think it's honestly a big black box.

Actually, I can send you a link after this. There was a CNBC article released last week that in 2024, 10% of Meta sales came directly from fraudulent ad campaigns. So when you consider 10%, or it quotes, 16 billion came from running online ads for scams, banned goods, et cetera.

5:21 Kurt Bell

It's a problem Meta's practically solving for, about 10% of the revenue coming from fraudulent ads. If the ads aren't being protected, then what does it say about the traffic coming into those ads, right?

5:31 Refunds, blocking traffic, and what it costs

Stephen Brown

Yeah, it's an economic disadvantage for them to do the right thing, so they're probably not going to invest a lot of time in that.

If somebody was trying to, let's say you get fraudulent traffic. I gave you the example of what one of my customers did, an extreme example. But my understanding from you guys is that you can request refunds. How does that work?

5:45 Kurt Bell

Yeah, we've kind of taken a two pronged approach to it.

Number one is creating IP exclusion audiences within the Meta and Google ad account. So if you've got a list of X amount of visitors that came in over the last 30 days that were deemed fraudulent and invalid, first off, let's put those in an audience, exclude them from future targeting, so you're not paying and running ads to target people that we know are bad actors, or would really lead to invalid traffic. That's step one. That's been very successful, and that's where that three to four and a half percent savings has come from.

6:25 Kurt Bell

Step two is then, through the typical support process with Meta and Google, requesting a refund for the traffic that did make it through, to be able to request a refund for that spend that was wasted.

And I would say that's been less successful than the proactive IP exclusion. But we're still seeing some sort of refunds in the form of ad credits hitting the ad accounts for these companies.

6:50 Stephen Brown

Why is it hard to get the refunds? Are they just resistant? Are they requiring a lot of evidence? What is it about that process that is problematic?

7:00 Kurt Bell

All the above, right?

I think Meta and Google aren't companies that are looking to give back money if they don't need to. And then there's also the data piece of it, what's legally defensible as invalid traffic or not. And they have every right to make those claims there.

And so it's kind of filtering through that data to get down to, the gross number that we send out to them in terms of a refund request is never what is given back. There's always a conversation back and forth, and then whittling it down to what is the legally defensible amount that should be credited back to the customer.

7:33 Stephen Brown

Now, you guys are doing this with technology. Could a brand even do this manually? Is it something they could even do, or would it require a ton of data analysis to understand what the fraudulent traffic is?

7:46 Kurt Bell

Yeah, I mean, the actual short answer is no. It's not something they could do on their own unless they had access to, unless they built the pixel with the AI agents looking for the exact data points that we are continually fine tuning to know what to be looking for when the traffic is coming through.

So could it be done? Yes. Would it be difficult and labor intensive on the brand's part? Yes, it would be.

8:08 Stephen Brown

Okay, so this is probably why nobody's doing this. It's just too data intensive, you really need technology to do it right.

So tell me a little bit more about how you guys identify bad actors in the data. What is going on that you are determining is fraudulent traffic?

8:29 Kurt Bell

Yeah. We're looking at the IP address, we're looking at the geographical area that they're visiting from, we're looking at the duration of the website visit, how long were they on the site? Was it a spoof? Did they actually stay and visit the website?

Like I said, there are about 40 different data points that we're looking at, and that's more on the engineering side that would have the fine tuned details of exactly what we're looking for. But at a high level, those are some of the hot points that we're looking at with this traffic that's coming through.

8:55 Stephen Brown

Is there anything unique that you guys are seeing on Meta versus Google? Are there differences in fraudulent traffic that happen on those two platforms?

9:06 Kurt Bell

I would say Google has been a little bit easier to work with in terms of identifying the [unclear], simply due to the clicks being an easier thing to trigger, versus how do you identify it on the Meta side.

So the refunds we've seen are higher on Google. The preventative savings we've seen are higher on Google. So between the two, brands that are spending heavily on Google are seeing higher savings than those that are maybe more Meta-focused.

9:30 Stephen Brown

So 3 to 4 percent. If I'm spending, let's say, $100,000 on ads a month, that's $3,000 to $4,000 a month, that's like $36,000 to $48,000 a year. That's a lot of money. It starts to add up, especially when you're getting squeezed in so many other areas.

9:52 Kurt Bell

Yeah, it is. And what's interesting for us is we're a card-first company, right, Stephen? At Dash.fi we offer corporate credit cards specifically for digital advertising and shipping spend. And our main value prop is high cash back, high limits. And then this AdPay Protection service is more a supplementary or complementary product to that.

So companies come to us for the upfront cash back on their ad spend, but then we add additional value by the incremental savings. So yes, 30, 40K coming back from the AdPay Protection is significant, but then you couple that with what they're getting on the cash back side and it gets much more aggressive there.

10:32 Ad spend trends and diversification

Stephen Brown

So let's talk a little bit about ad spend.

We look at people's financials. I would say for a low cost of goods sold brand, ad spend is quite possibly the highest category of spend that they have. It's not uncommon to see a direct to consumer brand spend 20 to 35, sometimes even more, percent of sales on ad spend.

Are you guys seeing any interesting trends around ad spend? Any interesting insights as we're here in 2025?

11:03 Kurt Bell

Yeah, it's a great question. I think you're spot on. That's what we see on our end as well, in between 20 and 30% of their revenue is what they're allocating to the ad spend side of things.

What's been interesting, I'd say in the last, call it nine to 12 months, is the diversification of vendors that we're seeing come through on our cards. Whereas previously it was two, it was Meta and Google, that's almost where all the spend's going. Now we're seeing AppLovin and these different areas come in where they're advertising on different platforms. You've got Pinterest, TikTok, TikTok Shop, et cetera.

11:40 Kurt Bell

So people are diversifying. I think that's a function of performance on Meta not being as lucrative as it once was for them, but also just trying to diversify the strategy and reach more customers across different areas.

11:47 Stephen Brown

I read an interesting report yesterday about TikTok Shop. It said TikTok Shop is now as big as eBay. That was a little bit of a shocker for me. I think that might be global sales.

There's been a lot of hype around TikTok Shop and I wasn't sure how real it was. But when I read that article I was like, okay. Still, eBay is microscopic compared to Amazon, but that's a big jump in terms of that ad spend.

So, ad diversification. Any interesting platforms? You mentioned Pinterest. Anything that's surprising to you guys besides the diversification?

12:15 Kurt Bell

No, not necessarily.

I think what's interesting on our end is just the way brands are thinking about how they're paying for their ads. I mean, that's where we live day in and day out, is the way that they're actually paying these vendors for the advertising spend that they're running.

And so I'm not sure if you want to dive into that today, but I think that that's more of the interesting finding on our end, and where we've been able to take a leadership role in the education piece to brands, in terms of what we're seeing, what's working, and how they can implement it in their own company.

12:50 How brands pay for ads

Stephen Brown

No, let's go down that path. This is interesting. Tell me more.

12:55 Kurt Bell

Yeah. I mean, prior to what we've been able to create, there were kind of two schools of thought.

There were brands that were spending high enough volumes that a typical credit card, an Amex, Capital One, a personal guarantee card from the founders, wasn't working. It didn't have a high enough limit or capacity. So they switched over to invoicing terms with Meta and Google. That was a little bit more stable for them.

13:30 Kurt Bell

Or they were spending low enough, or they were prioritizing the Amex SkyMiles or whatever they may have been getting, that they wanted to stick with the personal guarantee card. What that would lead to is paying it off on an almost daily basis, and not really being able to take advantage of the float.

What we've seen is there's Dash.fi as well as a few other cards in the space that are offering more flexible payment terms, that allow a company to have the best of both worlds. That they can still have their negative cash flow conversion cycle and push out payment terms in a way that's profitable for them as a business, while capturing some sort of cash back incentive back to the company that can be used in multiple ways.

14:10 Kurt Bell

It can be taken as personal benefit to founders to supplement income. It could be used to increase payroll, to hire new roles. Or we've seen it just sent back to the bottom line to increase EBITDA, to increase the valuation as they're looking at an exit opportunity.

But it just feels the conversation shifted a little bit. Companies are realizing that invoicing terms are great, but what is the actual amount of float you're receiving there? And is it worth sacrificing two to three percent cash back on your largest line item in your business?

14:34 Kurt Bell

And vice versa, for those that have the low limits, how can there be higher cash back and longer payment terms available to help them find a middle ground? So I think that that's been the trend we've seen. It's been very exciting to be a part of.

14:49 Stephen Brown

What spend amounts are you seeing with your customers? I'm sure it varies widely, but are you guys working with people that are spending 100K a month? How big of a volume of spend are you seeing on ads?

15:04 Kurt Bell

Yeah. The starting point for us, we start working with companies once they're around the hundred to $150,000 a month on Meta and or Google, that's when we come into play.

And on the high end, we have companies that are spending upwards of 15, 20 million per month running through the card. Which is insane to me, that there's that amount of spend going through a credit card, was something that was very new to me joining this space, but it's being done.

15:29 Stephen Brown

20 million a month.

15:31 Kurt Bell

Correct, yes.

15:33 Stephen Brown

So let me do the math. Let's say, just keep it easy, if that's a third of revenue, 60 million a month, that's like almost a billion dollar brand. 720 million. Yeah, that's a huge amount of ad spend. Holy crap, all going on a card.

15:57 Stephen Brown

Let's go back to the diversification of spend. Historically, you're right, I feel like it was Meta and Google. How much are brands spending as a percentage of ad spend on the others? It's probably really brand specific, but are you seeing any brands that are spending a lot of money, like more than 10% of ad spend, on non-Meta, non-Google channels?

16:15 Kurt Bell

There are some. I would say the majority of clients we work with, 70 to 80% of the spend is all on Meta, and then another 20 to 30% is broken up pretty evenly.

If I were to take a step back, I think when I first joined it was Meta 70, Google's 20, the other 10% spread across smaller channels. And now I'd say it's more Meta 70 and 30% is split very evenly across the other channels, with Google taking a smaller spot there. That's what we're seeing on our end, at least, across our customer base.

16:50 Kurt Bell

And they're ebbing and flowing with who they test with. Especially the very successful brands we're working with, they are always pushing the boundaries, testing new channels. They're iterating consistently to see what's working.

17:02 Stephen Brown

Let me pull on something you said. Did I hear right that you guys are seeing Google spend decline?

17:10 Kurt Bell

A bit, yes. And that's obviously on our card.

Now that I'm saying it, part of that is because Google stopped accepting card as a form of payment. So our data is going to be very heavily skewed that way. There are still those that Google allows to pay with the card, so take that into consideration with that comment. I should have clarified there.

17:30 Stephen Brown

No, that makes sense.

Anything that you feel like is accelerating that you guys are seeing in the data? Because I feel like ecommerce, they're always looking for the next thing. Last year I felt like there was a ton of hype around AppLovin, I'm not sure if it's materialized or not. And this year there's been a lot of buzz about TikTok Shop, and seeing that article I was like, okay, maybe the buzz is real.

Are you seeing anybody starting to accelerate, or are these newer channels still kind of in that emerging status?

18:08 Kurt Bell

I'd say AppLovin is still very much part of the conversation. I think they've opened up to the general public at this point, instead of the beta model, where more brands can get in. We're seeing the brands that were previously in it continue to double down and spend more there. We're seeing other brands start to join in.

So I'd say that AppLovin and TikTok are the two emerging channels that we're seeing, in terms of where brands are spending outside of Meta.

18:34 Advertising on AI platforms, and cash back as a cash flow lever

Stephen Brown

Okay, that seems about right.

Are you guys thinking about, I know it hasn't really emerged, but it feels like next year there's a good chance we're going to see ad programs on AI. I haven't seen anything tangible. The biggest thing I've seen is that ChatGPT is facilitating in-product checkout. And I've been watching really closely and there's nothing on the roadmap, but I read an article a while back that said it looked like they were hiring for an ad platform team.

I've got to figure it's only a matter of time before you're able to advertise in these platforms. Have you guys had any thought or have any inside scoop on AI related advertisement, or are you in the same boat where you're just waiting and watching?

19:22 Kurt Bell

Yes, I would say waiting and watching, no inside scoop. I think it's definitely something that's top of mind for us and something we're looking to be early adopters on.

But I think you're right, it's a matter of time. Huge monetization opportunity for them to monetize on the advertising front. Things I'm seeing, same as you, just in the DTC community, are people optimizing their SEO to be able to rank higher in the ChatGPT responses. I know brands are prepping for it as well on the natural organic side of things. But I wish we did have an inside scoop there, it'd be nice.

19:54 Stephen Brown

To me it just seems like the logical next step. Because I've been watching a lot, and the term I'm hearing is GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. And really what it looks like is just instrumenting your listings.

I'm a co-owner of a brand, and my operating partner and I talk about this almost every week, and he's like, there's a ridiculous amount of parameters you can put on a product listing. And our thesis based on what we've read is you could just keep putting stuff on there and on there. And that's the organic side of things.

20:30 Stephen Brown

But to me, having an ad platform just seems obvious. I read about how much OpenAI is losing in terms of money. So surely they're going to come up with an ad platform at some point.

At which point it'd be really interesting to see what happens, because the amount of traffic that's going to these AI chatbots, forget in-product checkout, you could just do ad platforms and you're probably going to see a tremendous amount of income in those areas, as long as they do them right.

20:58 Kurt Bell

Yeah, it'll be very interesting. And then the next question on that is attribution, right? What are the solutions that help solve for actually attributing what's coming through ChatGPT advertising back to your storefront, and measuring performance to know whether or not it's worth investing in? So lots of questions.

21:13 Stephen Brown

Well, you're already seeing attribution. We looked at our brand and you are seeing attribution coming from ChatGPT. I'm not sure exactly how that's being done, other than maybe just looking at referral traffic. Once you get in-app checkout, that'll be really easy to attribute.

But again, attribution is one of the mysteries, and also controversies I think, in ecommerce. Because these platforms like to take a lot of credit for a sale, and you've got the emergence of these third-party tools that try and independently give attribution. It's just a very interesting part of the ecommerce ecosystem.

21:55 Stephen Brown

Any other interesting trends around ad spend that you guys are thinking about, talking about? Obviously we've talked about the fraud, we've talked about some of the patterns. Anything else that's been a surprise or an interesting insight as of late?

22:17 Kurt Bell

No, not necessarily. I think the one other thing that I touched on a little bit, and again this is more bias in what we do day in and day out, is just the way that the rewards are being used.

Most companies have got the travel points, which are great that they're leveraging. But being able to, one, switch to true cash back, and then leverage that cash back for meaningful business expenses, is what's been interesting to me. And that's all customer led on our end.

22:50 Kurt Bell

It's interesting to see as we sit down and strategize, hey, here's your rewards, how do you want to use them? How can we help you? And to hear what they're coming up with. It can be fun things like purchasing season tickets or box seats or whatever, funding lifestyles, which are fun to hear about.

But then you hear, we're able to hire X, Y, Z role, or we are able to increase our ad budget by 3% because we just put the card back on file in the ad account and ran it there, which led to X amount of revenue. Every company approaches it differently. But for me I find it fascinating when they're plugging it back into the business, and we're able to see the real impact that cash back is making. Something that you couldn't do with a point or something like that.

So that's the only trend we're seeing. And we're trying to take our learnings and figure out how do we help teach the market what are some of the best practices.

23:39 Stephen Brown

No, that's a good point. I've got to tell you, because we support them on the accounting and the finance, I've found it really interesting that sometimes ecommerce operators get so focused on the benefits that they don't always think strategically about the business.

It is a nice fringe benefit, don't get me wrong. I'm a business owner, I own two businesses, the fringe benefits of card spend are awesome.

24:10 Stephen Brown

But I would argue that cash flow is one of the biggest challenges of every consumer product business, because of the long inventory lead times. And with payouts, it's fairly quick with Shopify, it's usually about two days, about 14 days with Amazon, up to 14 days. And then when you get into wholesale it can be like 30, 60, 90.

And I feel like your card spend as a cash flow lever is under considered. People are more quick to go out and get expensive debt. Like, let's go get a Shopify loan. Than take a step back and say, yeah, this points based system is nice, but perhaps I could put more cash into the business.

25:00 Stephen Brown

Using a different card strategy, or just using cards at all. Lever number one, leverage your cards, leverage the terms as long as you can, because cash flow is a challenge for every brand. And I just think they don't always think through the full picture. Are you chasing ad spend, or are you chasing enterprise value? And enterprise value comes through profits, through cash flow, things like that.

25:25 Kurt Bell

Yeah, I think you're spot on.

And I think the way we've worded it as well is, our cash back ranges, depending on the amount of float that you're looking for, are going to be in between two and 3%, which is top of the market. And if you asked any brand today, would you like a two to 3% discount on your Meta bill? The hands in the room would go up immediately, right?

But it's interesting how many brands are still hyper focused on, well, I'm optimizing my points to get this many travel, the flight first class, et cetera.

26:00 Kurt Bell

And we always say, hey, leverage your travel cards, max out the benefits. There's a way to play both. We're not saying you shouldn't enjoy the fringe benefits. But in the long run you're leaving money on the table for the business if you're hyper-focused on that and not the enterprise value. I think you're spot on there, Stephen.

26:10 Stephen Brown

Well, you've been in ecommerce for a while. What year did you start with ecommerce tech?

26:16 Kurt Bell

[unclear]

26:17 Stephen Brown

We're like in a different era of ecommerce.

I would say we got going in ecommerce probably about 2016 is when we started focusing. So we've been around, and I think about it, there are multiple eras, with the COVID peak being like an era unto its own, right? The hyper spending, the high valuations.

26:42 Stephen Brown

But comparing 2020, or even 2019, to 2025, it's a totally different game. The margins are tighter. The costs of lending are higher. The ad efficiency, it's not even the same equation from 2020 to 2025.

And I feel like brands are going to have to really look at every lever of profitability that they can, because it's just not easy money anymore. It's now roll up your sleeves, grind it out to profitability industry.

27:17 Kurt Bell

I think you're spot on. That's definitely what we're seeing, especially those that have been on invoicing terms in the past are realizing just how much money is being left on the table. For relatively, the difference of leveraging a card on net 30 terms versus invoicing and averaging out to net 45, but keeping the cash on hand for 15 days more, is not earning them incremental yield in a bank account. And so that switch has been a very solid move for them.

27:50 Kurt Bell

I think something I'm noticing as well, just selling into companies in 2020 versus now, is buyers are very savvy. They're very educated. Companies are streamlining their tech stacks. They're only bringing on software or services that are truly value add and are moving the needle.

And so that's why it's been so fun to be a part of this team here at Dash and build it, is just knowing the value we're adding is real and significant. And I also don't take for granted the companies we get to work with. They're companies I see online every day, companies I see in the store when I go. And to know that they place their trust and confidence in me and in Dash.fi is no small thing, and pushes us to make sure we have to come with our best foot forward. Because they're not just bringing on any vendor, whereas 2020 may have been a little easier to get into companies.

28:33 Stephen Brown

Yeah. I think about it in a lot of ways. I feel like ecommerce is just a different form of retail in terms of the financial profile. You may not be spending as much money on real estate, but you are probably spending more on customer acquisition. Although there's a lot of craft brick and mortar retail out there.

In 2020 it was almost like this magic elixir of money. And now, even looking at Amazon, most of their profits are coming from AWS. As a percentage of profit to sale ratio, they're making a lot more margin off of AWS than they are off of Amazon.com, the store.

29:20 Stephen Brown

I think there are some inherent advantages of ecommerce, but we're just in a different era where it's going to be a fight. It's going to be a slog. You have some intelligence you don't get from brick and mortar that allows you to understand the consumer better than ever. But it's not the gravy train that it was a few years ago.

And I think I'm with you, I think those who are going to survive are going to be more savvy. They're going to be more operationally and financially intelligent than they ever were. And we're probably going to see a lot less of those guys on Facebook ads and YouTube ads that are selling a course on how to make a lot of money on ecommerce. I just feel like that era is quickly coming to an end.

29:58 Kurt Bell

Yeah, I think you're spot on. The operators that are winning are true operators, and they're iterating, they're diversifying.

We talked a little bit about diversifying ad budgets. They're diversifying from being only ecom to branching into wholesale, to even having retail representation. They're diversifying payment methods. They're becoming true structured businesses, which you can appreciate on the finance side as well, when you look at the balance sheet, P&L, what's leading to that.

Yeah, we're kind of seeing a separation of those that rode the wave versus those that built really solid foundational businesses.

30:29 How Dash.fi got here

Stephen Brown

So we talked a little bit about how you guys are solving the problem. Dash.fi, what was the background there? Did your founder see there's this problem and decide, I need to go solve it because only technology can do it? How did you guys get into doing what you're doing?

30:46 Kurt Bell

Yeah. We talked about attribution earlier. So Dash.fi actually started as an analytics and attribution platform for media buyers. That was about five or six years ago.

And Zach, our founder, Zach Johnson, kind of realized there was a gap in the market in terms of how people were paying for their advertising spend. Like we were talking about, they were either on invoicing or they were using a personal guarantee Amex or whatever it may be. So he got into an accelerator with Visa, built what is the Dash.fi card. And then from there scaled that for the last four years.

31:30 Kurt Bell

And then about a year ago, just over a year ago, again saw a gap in the market with the bot traffic, the different litigation and reports that were out there. Took his analytics and attribution background and built this product, which we've titled AdPay Protection, this pixel that helps identify, and rolled that out in conjunction with the card.

So it's been interesting how our roots kind of led to the product that's helped propel a lot of our growth. Both products, technically the pixel doesn't have a lot to do with the card directly, but they're both focused on helping companies maximize the return they're getting on their ad spend from a savings level. And that's where we found the synergy there.

31:59 Stephen Brown

And you were telling me before we started recording that you guys started shifting your focus from capturing refunds to just avoiding the fraudulent traffic altogether. So you're trying to get in front of that instead of waiting for it to happen.

32:12 Kurt Bell

Correct, yeah. I think as the refunds, we're still seeing some success there, but with response times delaying and things like that, it's how do we add more immediate value to the customer? And those preventative or exclusion audiences are a very easy, immediate, simple way to be able to show a brand immediate impact on their ad budgets.

32:33 Stephen Brown

Are there any directions that you guys are thinking about that you haven't pursued yet? Any interesting problems that haven't been solved yet that you're wanting to solve? Or are you guys just heads down trying to continue to execute on what you're doing?

32:47 Kurt Bell

Zach's a true visionary founder, where he's always thinking of problems that haven't even crossed my mind yet. So without sharing too much, I think you've alluded a little bit to the shipping solution we've come out with. You talked about AWS, how do we solve these same problems that are in the cloud service side of the world. There's a lot that we're thinking through. And then the AI component as well. But yeah, we've got plenty in the works, which is good.

33:14 Stephen Brown

That's exciting. Well, I think it's great to have solutions like what you guys are doing. Like I said, this year has been another year of margin squeeze with tariffs. And I think brands need to be looking at ways to claw back margin wherever they can. And it's awesome to have people like you out there in the industry that are trying to find ways to help brands claw back that margin.

If somebody wanted to connect with you, what's the best way to do it?

33:39 Kurt Bell

Yeah, first of all, thank you, I appreciate that, Stephen. I appreciate the conversation, I really enjoyed this today.

I think if people are interested and wanted to learn more, I'm on LinkedIn, Kurt Bell, or my email, [email protected], or the learn more form fill on our website. But I would love to chat with anyone and everyone that's interested in learning a little bit more.

33:59 Stephen Brown

Awesome. Kurt, thanks for joining us today, and keep up the good work.

34:04 Kurt Bell

Awesome, thanks Stephen, we'll talk soon.