A personal note: Last Friday I was fortunate enough to participate in the Veteran's Day Parade along with the Jewish War Veterans and BSA Scouts as their Chaplain. I was able to drive my car, lights and sirens behind our float, and kids from all over came up to see the Jewish Veterans, some of them in their 90s and
thank them for their service. A few people I knew came up, one of my wife's students went nuts that she was in a "police car" with me. Taking the day off to do that, not write a column was a much needed break. Sometimes consider that...
Can Retargeting Ads Can be Magnets for Fraud?
Retargeting ads are now an essential component of any online marketing
campaign. They help you reach consumers who have already shown an interest in what your company has to offer. However, some companies and brands have chosen to completely avoid retargeting ads because they've become overly saturated with fraud.
What Are Retargeting Ads?
Retargeting is when you display an ad to people who have visited your website but not made a purchase, using a first-party cookie. This is honestly, a really
effective way to work with customers -- and usually has a very high ROI.
Retargeting campaigns allow you to reach out and offer individuals who have already visited your site the chance to buy something again. Ever noticed the ads from Amazon that popup that show you similar items to buy? Yep, that's retargeting.
You can also target them by using Google Ads remarketing lists for search ads and similar products, which allows you to show those visitors ads
who’ve already expressed an interest in your product. You can remind your prospects about the problems they are trying to solve and why your product is the best way for them to address those issues.
How Likely Is Bot Fraud to Affect Your Retargeting Campaigns?
The cost of retargeting fraud is huge. According to the 2019 AAF Bot Traffic Report, which surveyed marketers in all industries, 68% of respondents said they’ve
experienced bot fraud on their retargeting campaigns. The problem is so prevalent that Google has started penalizing sites for having too much bot traffic, believing that this may be a sign that they are purposely bringing bots to their sites.
Some sources (universally those who sell questionable ad space) will minimize the risk of being targeted by an unscrupulous retargeting campaign.
According to this claim, a bot would have to visit your page and load a tracking
cookie, then click on an ad on another site—which is too much of a hassle for fraudsters.
They will tell you this "never happens" and give you some statistics that seem to back them up, but are a little "fishy." In response, fraudsters have become superb at overcoming the safeguards and getting paid huge sums of money for their unethical work. I have to believe some networks are well aware that this is happening, and allow a "little fraud" to creep in to pad the
pockets.
Also, this isn't your grandfather's bot fraud. Modern bot fraud schemes are more sophisticated than ever.
Fraudsters can bypass common anti-bot measures like CAPTCHA, and they set up the logic for going from one webpage to a preprogrammed destination site—with an ad banner waiting there so they can click on it—fairly easily.
We all know that "AI" can draw photos, compose songs, so why can't
simple programs commit fraud? They can.
Some fraudsters may be counting on the sense of security that retargeting ads promise to their victims, to increase their illegitimate earnings. They depend on the myth that retargeting is the "most effective, fraud-free" method when it's far from being either of those things.
If media buyers assume that their ads are more secure, then they’re less likely to scrutinize the leads they get by default or at least hesitate
before penalizing them as suspiciously high-performing leads so long as they aren't getting complaints from customers who feel duped into buying products or services that don't exist yet.
If you're not careful, retargeting fraud can lead to serious consequences for your business.
Here are four common side effects:
Ad fraud leads to increased spending on digital advertising with a reduced return on
investment. Retargeting fraud can cause revenue losses for businesses being charged for fraudulent impressions, clicks and conversions. Almost always the ad network of reseller will attempt to tell you that the fraud is almost non-existent even if clearly the campaign didn't come close to a positive ROI, and the rest of the metrics are all wonky.
Bot-generated form fill forms. If a bot clicks on an ad leading to a form fill,
it would then complete the conversion by filling out the entire form on its own. A bot may use real data from actual consumers to make a conversion seem more realistic. In this case, the business will be charged for it without receiving any value in return.
And thus, damage to Brand Reputation. Retargeting campaigns that reach out to fake leads can hurt both your PR efforts and long-term business prospects—and may even attract
negative attention thanks to TCPA lawsuits if you're illegally contacting people based on bad data
Skewed Marketing Metrics. Data is crucial to making more informed decisions for your organization as a whole . But when your marketing data is skewed by bots and fake leads, your metrics will be inaccurate. This can cause you to invest in campaigns that don’t actually work—and may even waste time and money on strategies that aren’t
producing the results you want.
So, you ask, how can you prevent this? Is it even possible? The answer is, well, sorta, and yep, you can, but it's not always easy.
Check your ad campaigns for fraud regularly.
Monitor your campaigns and look for signs of fake users by seeing what they do. If a user consistently bounces off the first page, when you normally have a 5-page deep
user base on other advertising—it's time to investigate.
De-targeting is the process of removing certain people or behaviors from your marketing list. It used to be that the most common de-targeting method was IP exclusion lists.
Media agencies could create a list of known IP addresses at which fraudulent clicks originate—data centers, VPN providers, etc.—and add these to advertising platforms in order to ensure
that their ads remain available for clicking, and that the fraud companies don't get any money.
The issue is scale: there are too many fraudulent sources.
To protect themselves from abuses by advertisers, many media buyers take steps to exclude certain types of ads
For example, you can block ads that display only in known browsers—not allowing any other ad on your website for products or services
related just to a specific browser's audience.
There are various technologies available to businesses, such as artificial intelligence that can help detect suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.
Requiring some consumers to interact with an AI will ensure that the bots that can't navigate the AI will be immediately noticed and excluded.
Most real networks and advertising suppliers have operations teams that can easily detect fraud, so
most sources of traffic that allow bots are doing it on purpose.
Analytics programs can provide valuable insight into potentially harmful behaviors. Monitoring your analytics for anomalies is a way to spot bad bots—look for users who come from strange countries or visit sites at odd times of day, etc.
Check the number of page views per session across all ad units associated with the same targeting criteria to see if
there is obvious fraud in some of the campaigns. If the number of page views per session is low, your ad isn’t doing its job or there is fraud. Check the number of sessions per user over time to see if there is a consistent trend.
If there is a consistent trend, the issue may be with the user experience on your website or with the content of your ad. If there isn’t a consistent trend, it could be due to changes in the campaign or targeting criteria.
Check
the average time spent on site per session over time to identify changes in visitor behavior. If there is a trend, you may be able to cancel ad campaigns that are no longer producing results.
Fraud is still a real issue in our industry-- and frankly, I think can be solved. I've been writing about this for years, since 2001 in ClickZ, MediaPost, Adotas, MarketingSherpa, you name it-- and it's still very much alive and well. If we take it seriously, and everyone institutes plans
and solutions to prevent it, we can perhaps remove it from our ecosystem completely.
Special thanks to Fraud Fighter Rich @ Anura.IO for their insight
Pesach Lattin
Pesach@lattin.us
Connect with me on LinkedIn.