The Theft They Call Display Advertising: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 14)

The Theft They Call Display Advertising: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 14)

TRANSCRIPT: Let’s dive into display, and we’ll just call it what it is, the theft they call display advertising, because that’s what I see out there. I see this a lot. Now, this is where the real ad fraud exists. Depending on the source, digital ad fraud runs between 12 and 16 billion dollars every year, and it’s growing. This fraud’s not perpetrated though, by your display vendor. I want you to understand that, but generally by sketchy websites, and mobile apps that they’ll put up tons of ads, and they use bots, right? Robots to look at the ads and click on them.

Now while your SEM might be stealing from you … Your SEM, by the way, provides you with your display marketing as well. While they might be stealing from you, they’re generally not doing it with fake ad views, and bot clicks, okay?

Just like click fraud in PPC, your best option to combat digital ad fraud and display, is to track and measure your ROI. Where do you track this? You track it in Google Analytics of course. You should be buying display from your PPC provider, and through the ad word system only, so that all of the conversion metrics remain the same.

Where is your SEM stealing, when it comes to display? Let me take you through this. One, via the under reporting of admin and management fees, just like they do with PPC. They do this by marking up the cost of the display ads. Now, to combat this, again, you need to be paying Google directly for your display as well.

Let me give you a quick display theft example, that I see a lot with display. Your agency, the person selling you the PPC and the display, they’re buying display impressions for about $1 per thousand impressions, also called a $1 CPM, cost per thousand. They sell these impressions to you at anywhere between $5 and let’s say $18 CPM. They tell you that’s a good deal. This means that for every one million impressions, you should be paying $1,000, but instead you’re paying $5,000 to $18,000, for the same million impressions.

“Now wait a minute? My SEM, my display advertising company vendor, they’re paying $1,000 and are charging me between $5,000 and $18,000? Where did the extra $4,000 or $17,000 go?” In their pocket. How are you falling for this? The number one problem is you’re paying the SEM vendor for your display, you’re paying them directly instead of paying Google through your ad words account.

They’re generously, I’ve seen this, “Hey listen, we’re not going to charge you for display. We’re going to run that separately for you. We’re going to be generous.” They’re not charging you a management fee for display, since you’re already paying 41% for your PPC management, but you’re paying a whole lot more, generally up to a 500% or more, that’s why it says 500% +++ markup. Now, they tell you again that a $5 CPM or an $18 CPM or anything in between, “That’s a great price. We got you a great price. You’ll be on all the top sites.”

How do you combat this? Same as pay per click. Again, pay Google directly, and link your display account to your analytics account, “But Steve,” I hear this, “Our vendor said they use multiple ad exchanges to optimize vid strategy.” Those multiple ad exchanges, that’s where the fraud occurs most often. Demand they only use Google for display and require that they link the display account with its spend, how much they’re spending, to your analytics account. Again, just pay Google directly, and we take care of all that.