How to Use Financial Anomaly Detection in Finance & Marketing
By: Eric Vardon
Tags: Financial Analysis, Marketing Security, Roi, Digital Marketing, Anomaly Detection

Finance is a massively important part of any business. However, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

That’s why 60% of small business owners believe they aren’t knowledgeable about finance or accounting. How about yourself?

Balance sheets, income statements, budgets, etc. — not the funniest things in the world.

Moreover, optimizing finances, spending, and expenses add to the mountain of financial tasks to do every day.

You’re already overseeing a team, managing tools, and struggling to find time for business development.

But, there’s a new solution that few companies are taking advantage of to solve all of these problems. It’s called financial anomaly detection. And, it’s a lot easier to implement than you might think.

Want to learn how? Continue reading.

What is financial anomaly detection in marketing?

Financial anomaly detection is artificial intelligence-powered software that identifies rare events. These include both worthwhile financial opportunities and potential risks.

Here’s how it works: a company adopts marketing security software like Morphio to begin. The AI analyzes the company’s financial data to determine what normal operations look like. These are placed within a standard deviation.

Any data sets found outside of the normal band is a financial anomaly. A.K.A a suspicious piece of marketing financial data that needs to be investigated.

Anomalies in finance are also placed within three levels: 1, 2, and 3. Think of one as a minor anomaly and three being major. Major anomalies are tackled first and then the lesser ones are addressed afterward.

It can seem complicated, but it isn’t. This technology is plug-and-play. You register, integrate tools and campaigns, and kick your feet up. You work as usual and the software will find optimizations and problems on the fly.

The data is also easy to understand with straight-forward information and simple dashboards.

Here’s an email alert you’d receive from Morphio, for instance:

Easy enough, right? Once you’re alerted revenue isn’t on track or you’re hitting KPIs out of the park, you investigate to find out why.

That brings me to my next point.

Financial anomaly detection uses cases

Now that you understand what anomaly detection in finance is, I’m going to run you through some of the best use cases.

Fraud and risk detection

Problems happen when you least expect them. Having peace of mind knowing you’re at a lower risk of financial fraud is priceless. It’s also one of the best uses of financial anomaly detection.

Financial fraud and risks come in many different forms, too. These include credit card fraud, unsafe transactions, and data breaches.

In fact, while identity theft has declined, fraud has continued to increase since 2015.

No need to sweat bullets, though. Financial anomaly detection takes the weight off your shoulders so you can get back to working on what matters.

For example, a large financial e-commerce company began working with a fraud prevention company to make its platform safer. In particular, they had money disappear, fraudulent orders on a regular basis and knew something had to change.

A machine learning algorithm was created to allow or disallow transactions based on standard behavior and historical datasets.

The results? Cost reduction in solving fraud-related issues, customer support, refund forms, and refund verification. Additionally, customer satisfaction increased since transactions were simpler, faster, and safer.

Maximizing marketing budgets

Marketing takes money. Everything from content marketing to SEO and PPC takes consistent cash to scale a business.

Have you ever wondered if you’re getting the most out of your budget, though? Don’t worry. It keeps most marketers up at night. 29% of businesses fail because they simply run out of money. That means you have to use your capital in the best way possible.

Financial anomaly detection solves this by analyzing marketing and advertising campaigns. It finds elements that are generating the greatest performance and those draining hard-earned money.

This puts you in the position to jump on good opportunities and cut out the bad apples. Ultimately that means you will save budget on campaigns that are doing little while reallocating that into higher ROI ventures.

In other words, the client saved money, improved the customer experience, and gets to work smarter thanks to an anomaly algorithm.

Lower your expenses and costs

What expenses does your business have? Employees, equipment, and tool are probably a few. It’s easy to focus on optimizing conversions and CPC but forget there are many other ways to save money.

There’s no need to spend hours doing it yourself, either. You have enough on your plate.

Anomaly detection software discovers events including overspending, low conversion rates, and lack of ROI. This data is used to make adjustments like reducing the budget for certain projects, re-doing tool stacks, and cutting out low performing campaigns.

The best part? It’s all done for you. Managing teams, tools, and your daily tasks are enough to make your head spin. Take most of these little nuisances out of the way and suddenly you’re free to scale with ease.

That’s not to mention you lower your cost, save budget, and can allocate that time and money elsewhere.