One thing that COVID19 taught the entire country: Moved all the meetings to ONLY ONLINE mode and forced businesses to explore the online retail options to sustain themselves in a locked down world. What also ensued was a sudden infusion of money into the digital marketing space, with every brand, big or small, expanding their marketing budgets to promote digital marketing. While the (not so) new marketing tool is seeing millions of new customers, it is important to understand the risks involved in this type of marketing.
Dozens of digital marketing experts will argue the credibility of this form of marketing as it is highly measurable (impressions, clicks, and what not!), but very few will mention the reality behind these eye-popping numbers. The definitions of these digital jargons are easy to memorize, but difficult to understand. For example, an Impression is generally counted each time your ad is seen. But what was the time spent by the viewer on the ad? Is this viewer really my target audience? The answer to my second question would be: Yes! I set the target audience myself for the ads which are being shown. But to what extent? Besides demographic elements of your target audience, what other characteristics are factored in while displaying your ads through paid search media? The big numbers look impressive on spreadsheets and dashboards, but how close are they driving home your business results?
To further emphasize the argument above, let us take some real-life examples.
In 2017, JP Morgan Chase made a conscious call to cut their digital marketing spends, thereby, the advertisements, which were earlier displayed on 400,000 websites, were cut to just 5000 websites. What’s more is that each of these 5000 websites were pre-approved by the company – an activity known as whitelisting. What is the result that you expect? A huge fall in number of impressions? Yes, that happened. But one thing that did not change was, surprisingly, the visibility of the ads on the internet, cost of these impressions and hence the business from those ads.
What Chase did was considered as a “bold” step by the industry experts, as they risked missing out on “audience reach” and efficiency. But the company backed up their “bold” step by thorough research and revealed that out of 400,000 web addresses on which their ads showed up, only 3% or 12,000 web addresses showed an activity beyond an impression! Well, we would simple call this “wise”.
Today, many digital marketers will give you options of advertising on individual sites, giving additional services of easy filters to set your target groups of people across the web based on their browsing habits at cheap prices. This is known as programmatic advertising, which enables, for example, a Mamaearth ad to show on a local blog on parenting, or a pair of heels in your amazon cart to follow you around the internet for weeks. This kind of advertising is enabled by automated technology placing your brand on millions of websites. Risks involved? Your ads popping up next to toxic content like fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos!
Let us take another example:
Remember how Uber’s lawsuit against their agency Fetch in 2017 for ad fraud, where Uber claimed to have been billed for fake clicks and fake app installs, purchased through digital media? A similar suit was filed by Linkedin against anonymous data scrapers in 2016. Such ad fraud instances exist till date because this problem was never solved, because there is just too much money in it, which is increasing multi-fold every day! Long story short, the majority of the eye-popping numbers of the clicks and impressions that you monitor on your dashboards, are originating from bot activity currently.
Once again, we are not saying that digital marketing does not work. It works if the marketer is smart enough to experiment and find out what is best for his business. Chase did not need to show their content to 400,000 websites, when they could drive the same business results by showing it to 5000 websites. A simple decision to reduce the number of websites and mobile apps showing your ads by going to a strict include-list, prevents the vast majority of fly-by-night fake sites and mobile apps from sapping your digital ad budgets. A series of controlled experiments can help one easily determine which apps/websites drive results and which do not – hence controlling ad fraud for your business.
Digital marketing is an evolving process for any business. There is no quick guide to digital marketing. Not all paid advertising is ad fraud and there are many (and we repeat, many), channels of advertising digitally which cannot be ignored if you are building a business from scratch(but that is a topic for next time!). A little scepticism can save you millions, when it comes to digital marketing. Combine this with common-sense, and boom! You suddenly became a better digital marketer than any program claiming to do the digital advertising for you!
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By: Anmol Gupta | Isha Garg