Before You Invest In Online Advertising…
Okay, so your company has come up with a new doofangle. Nevermind that this doofangle is basically a copy of someone else’s doofangle, you want a slice of that doofangle-sales pie, (as it hasn’t been sliced up enough yet) and so you have a Product Launch coming up.
And you’re The Marketing Specialist.
And everything you’ve ever heard, or read, says you Have To Have An Online Campaign. And your company has given you the budget. (After all, with the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of tech, you might not have a company next year if the Doofangle 1 doesn’t sell millions of units.)
So you do your research, and conduct focus groups, and decide that having 20-somethings dance around a fountain holding the Doofangle 1 is what you’re going to go with. It’s zesty, hip, and it is F-U-N-!
You’re going to dress the dancers in vibrant colors, as the Doofangle 1 is a boring black plastic .. rectangle.
So you spend MILLIONS on TV ads. (Which nobody looks at, except to maybe laugh.)
And now you’re ready to launch your online banner ads, using still images from the TV spot. And you’re going to spend more MILLIONS, to get lots of eyeballs.
Oops.
You are now the person responsible for *urinating*-away millions on online ads that only robots looked at. As you didn’t know about click fraud, (a term first coined sometime around 1997) or botnets.
Sorry. But don’t worry. Someone is always hiring Marketing Specialists. A different one calls me at suppertime every night.
(Latest) * Chameleon Botnet Steals Millions
“Internet advertisers are the latest target of a botnet that could be costing them up to $6 million a month.” Read more..
(Last month) * Botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks
“The Bamital botnet defrauded the entire online advertising platform, which is what allows the Internet and many online services to be free..” Read more..
The entire history of defrauding the online advertisers would – I suspect – fill a book. But, “You Have To Have An Online Campaign”.
Everyone says.
I would think, though, that you’d want actual humans to see/hear your marketing efforts.. right?
It isn’t the ad services that take the hit; it’s you, the Doofangle seller.
Oh, well. Not every click is bogus… right? Some sales will happen.. right? But how will you know? That number might not be real either.
Down the rabbit hole.. and ignore the man behind the curtain.
At least with the airwaves advertising, the worst they can do is run your spots from 1am – 3:30am (or show you charts that say they ran all 1,000 spots but only air 200) … This online stuff seems 100% the shadows of vapor.
Today’s quote: “Go on till you come to the end; then stop.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
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• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
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Tech - for Everyone 
Paul, your description of Advertising is “funny” and Right On… Kudos!
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Gaia,
I am glad you got a chuckle.
It was kind of fun to write.
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I do wonder how often bots do click advertisements. I would hope hardly ever, because it would suck for advertisers.
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Geeks Hut,
I believe that “blackhat SEO” and online advertising fraud (such as using bots to click and view) is a far, far bigger problem than anyone wants to admit (dares admit) or, perhaps, even knows. But that is just my personal “hunch”. I am – however – sure that the advertisers work very hard to (try to) catch and stop fraud.
I mean.. hypothetically: what would happen to Google if word got out that as much as, say, 80% of your ads were viewed by bots, and less than 2% of clickthroughs were real people? And that’d been happening for the past 5 years?
Why, they’d be out of business overnight, and there’d be more lawsuits than there are lawyers.
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