One of the biggest challenges with the digital marketing space, currently, is fraud. This doesn’t make our industry special of course. Fraud is a part of our everyday life impacting everything from credit scores to logging in to your Domino’s pizza account. Just try and reset a password without your heartrate spiking.
It’s such a hot topic, that BBC recently did an exposé of a fraud call center where they took them out in the most satisfying way. The fraudsters were all panic, no disco! Check it out…
Big picture – it’s a problem everywhere. But how it thwarts your digital marketing efforts comes in three main forms:
WastedBudget:
Fraud in the form of bots and in the form of people (click farms and competitors) is a major waste of your ad budgets. Think about this: for every fraudulent click you get, you get one less click from a potential, genuine prospect. The more that malicious actors eat up your budget, the more invisible you become.
Wasted Time:
Ask a salesperson how they feel about fielding fake leads, and you’ll hear some “not so PG” language. And for good reason! The more time you waste on spam leads the less time you’re spending selling to good prospects.
Wasted Data:
This is perhaps the worst of the three, as it eats into your future far worse than that gap year you took in college (sorry, Mom). Data is the lifeblood of long-term campaign success. Both the managers of your digital marketing efforts and the big smart algorithms that the ad platforms are utilizing NEED data to optimize your campaigns. But if most of your data is coming from fraud and bots, the algorithms are going to optimize towards… you guessed it… fraud and bots. We’ve seen Google Performance Max campaigns produce upwards of 90% spam leads (one of the reasons we don’t recommend them).
The Solution(s)
Unfortunately, there is no one solution or one tool you can buy and call it a day. Spam comes at all angles, so you must fight it on all fronts. It also evolves, so your solutions must evolve as well. In the last few years, we’ve implemented a robust protocol for dealing with spam. And particularly in the last year, where the fraud problem has exploded with AI, we needed to ramp up our efforts. With that, we put together the AdsIntelligence Anti-Spam Protocol, and we have seen amazing results at decreasing the volume of spam getting through to our clients.
Does a little still get through? Absolutely – it always will – but we save budget, save bandwidth, and most importantly, we optimize towards real data to bring our clients real customers. Feel free to check out our protocol below at the download link. This will be an ever-changing document that will evolve along with fraud, keeping us a step ahead of spam.
