Is it true that 50% of the money I spend on digital advertising is wasted?
No. It’s more like 80%.
How is that possible?
Fraud mostly. From countless middlemen and opaque foreign distribution platforms. Followed closely by incompetence, indifference, and denial. And, of course, hapless marketing agencies, who think they know how to buy pay-per-click ads, but don’t.
Take a peek inside the black box of digital ad placement and this is what you’ll find:
- Ad injection
- Ad stacking
- Click farms
- Click hijacking
- Click injection
- Cookie stuffing
- Domain spoofing
- Pixel stuffing
Why is this tolerated?
The typical performance metrics of most PPC ad campaigns are meaningless but look good to the CFO and CEO, so why rock the boat? Besides, most big companies don’t want to admit — especially to their stakeholders — that they’re wasting most of their marketing budget.
Unfortunately, if you spend money on things that actually build your brand, attract new customers, and generate sales, the results would be hard to measure and, therefore, unthinkable to share with a client or your boss.
It’s unlikely that this trend will change until C-suite bureaucrats realize that there’s more to marketing than staring at a bunch of irrelevant graphs and bar charts in their executive dashboards. Sometimes, you need to get off your ass and go talk to customers
Don’t get swindled by spreadsheet marketing.
Sources
- Association of National Advertisers
- Financial Times
- Incorporated Society of British Advertisers
- Integral Ad Science
- Juniper Research
- Lumen Research
- “Inside the Black Box” by Bob Hoffman
