Lunio’s CEO, Neil Andrew, recently joined Patrick Curran from Spike and Matthew Gracey-McMinn and Alex McConnell from Netacea to chat about bots’ wide-reaching impact on marketing and analytics.
If you missed the webinar, you can watch the full recording below!
But, before you dive in, let’s briefly take a look at some of the topics they covered, including how ad fraud impacts everything from your marketing budget, strategy, optimizations, and results.
Why Should Marketers Care About Bots?
Bots are typically associated with security rather than marketing, and as a result, their catastrophic consequences often get overlooked.
Ad fraud is a problem that is only getting worse. In fact, it’s a massive source of income for organized crime.
While you might think that gangs spend their time selling drugs and weapons, they can make more money (with less risk) through advertising fraud.
Costing $67 billion globally every year, ad fraud has become the main revenue stream for criminals.
Worse still, data shows how accessible ad fraud has become, causing anyone with internet access and Google to get involved. Because it’s not yet illegal, professional and amateur fraudsters are now causing advertisers to hemorrhage money and hugely skew their view of what’s going on.
Everything marketers do is based on data. But when that data is incorrect because it’s been skewed by bots, everything else comes crumbling down – and that’s not an exaggeration.
How Bots Affect Your Marketing Analytics
When you speak to marketers about bot activity, their main concern is the amount of ad budget they’re wasting.
However, it isn’t just wasted money you need to be aware of; there’s a lot of lost revenue that can be attributed to low-quality clicks.
Lunio sees an average of 11% additional invalid clicks on Search campaigns to what ad networks detect. This number then increases to 36% for Display ads.
Translating this into real figures, if your average media spend sits at $100,000, and 11% is wasted, then that’s $11,000 down the drain. But it doesn’t stop there – if your average ROAS is 1000%, then that $11,000 actually represents a lot more.
This behavior impacts your budget decisions, retargeting campaigns, spend attributions, future optimizations, and everything else that your data informs.
Bot activity also puts your micro (or unicorn) audiences at risk. If these small, high-quality campaigns receive even a couple of invalid conversions because you’re aggressively bidding on this audience because you believe it to be closest to your ICP, then the downstream impact can be multiplied tenfold.
We spoke about this at London’s B2B Marketing Expo in November if this is something you’d like to delve into further.
If You Can’t Trust Your Data…
…then what’s the point?
It’s imperative to ensure your marketing strategy and decisions are guided by data based on your ideal customers. If your ad metrics are skewed by non-human traffic, it’s easy to make changes that lead your business in the wrong direction.
The downstream impact of invalid clicks is something that many marketers underestimate. Worse still, as ad networks such as Google and Facebook continue to push their automated solutions, those with invalid clicks circulating in their data streams unknowingly exacerbate the issue.
Machine learning relies on quality data, and if you’re feeding in rubbish, you’ll simply attract more of the same. So, it’s important to recognize how bots affect your marketing and how to stop them from leading you astray.
We Stop Bots Across All Your Digital Acquisition Channels
If bots are a concern of yours, then the Lunio platform prevents bots from ever hitting your website by preventing them from seeing your paid ads entirely, whatever the platform.
