Digital Marketing Exposed: What Agencies Won't Tell You
If companies can recognize this gap between marketing claims and what they can actually know then they can begin to demand that people be held personally responsible for their work. They can also make better choices about where they put any money intended on marketing campaigns.
One of the biggest problems now gnawing at digital marketing is attribution fraud, especially in programmatic advertising and affiliate marketing channels.
Ad fraud costs businesses billions every year in 'bot hits' to web pages, click farm labor or fake engagement data generated by impression laundering scams.
These sophisticated con-artists will set up networks of counterfeit sites, avoiding automated detection systems by using software to mimic human behavior. They make detecting fraudulent traffic increasingly hard.
Thus, advertising contracts may be for thousands of impressions delivered of which no real live prospect ever lays eyes on even one. Third-party verification tools assist in recognizing questionable traffic patterns but most small or mif-sized businesses are unaware that huge portions of their ad purchase may have no business value whatsoever due to nonhuman traffic.
The overemphasis on last-click attribution rules out really finding out which marketing channels most effectively get customers to buy.
They ignore the earlier interactions by which people first find out about a new product or service and later decide to buy it. Search ads often get more credit abroad because people click them just before buying, though social media posts and content, or on the web commercials might have been where they were really first introduced to throughout a period of weeks. Multi-touch attribution models offer a more accurate picture of where your customers are coming from, yet many agencies still report last-click metrics because these inflate performance in easily measurable channels. Vendors should be required to provide cross-channel attribution analysis which tells us about how different marketing activities fit together and do not compete for credit.
The transparency question is not just a matter of digital fraud. In agency pricing structures and markup on media buying, problems are rife.
Some agencies receive commissions as a percentage of what clients spend on ads-ingenuity not to be trusted because it makes them want more budget for clients regardless how little effect it has thereupon.
Markup on agency purchases can come to 30-50% above platform costs, hidden in bills rich with illusions of profitting for the client.
Agencies retained without specific objectives have the leeway to charge monthly fees for minimal output.
Smarter companies have performance-based compensation attuned to actual marks like cost-per-acquisition and return on ad spend.
Prompt and tangible performance reports, plus campaign account reviews, preventative check-up regularly prevents any of these from turning into purely vanity exercises designed to prop up agency takings.