Many solutions on the market identify and block invalid traffic in a siloed approach: they stop fraudulent clicks on different platforms but don’t share the information across channels.
There is massive and untapped potential in leveraging traffic analytics across multiple platforms. By proactively excluding illegitimate traffic in a holistic way, we can go further than simply stopping fraud on every single ad platform.
A Protective Analytics platform enables advertisers to get full transparency into their ad data, drive down CPAs while increasing conversion quality, and protect all paid media investments whatever the platform.
What The Current Fraud Situation Looks Like
Non-human, invalid, and fraudulent activity is on the rise on every network.
After protecting ads on Google for 5+ years, we’ve seen no improvement in the level of protection Google provides advertisers. While you can get partial refunds on occasion, this does nothing to stop illegitimate activity from retargeting you.
And this trend extends across all ad networks. As new social platforms like TikTok emerge, they’re rife with scams and fraud because they’re unpoliced.
This lack of action isn’t just tied to newer platforms. Facebook is now trying to normalize bot activity rather than prevent it, and this is why they have more bots than human users.
You see the same story on all the rest too:
- Reddit bots are used to influence political and social discussions.
- Twitter conversations are being suffocated by bot activity.
- Instagram breeds fake behavior in both its non-human and real users.
Advertisers have been left responsible for protecting their PPC campaigns for a long time. Now, it’s time to take back control.
Make Sure The Data You’re Using Is Clean And Valid
As a marketer, there’s nothing worse than working with muddled, dirty data. It’s impossible to optimize campaigns for a target audience when you don’t have a clear picture of who they are.
If you’re looking at click behaviors to infer who’s most likely to convert, but those clicks are actually bot activity, everything you do is going to steer you further away from your ideal customer, and attract more of the same.
It’s great to say a campaign spent $1000 and got you 300 leads. But, if you don’t know how much of that $1000 was spent on genuine clicks, then you’re not only wasting budget but are unknowingly capping the success of your campaigns.
The Downstream Impact Of Invalid Clicks
The damage illegitimate traffic has goes a lot further than just your ad data.
Let’s say you get five bad clicks on your Google ad. Not only do you then start optimizing off incorrect data and sending the wrong intent signals to your campaigns on other platforms, but if this invalid activity submits a spam lead, your Sales team will be losing time and money.
What could ‘just’ be $20 worth of bad clicks can easily turn into $1000s worth of wasted time.
Worse still, this lost revenue can quickly snowball. Say a conversion is worth $1000 (e.g. a mortgage lead), and you usually convert at ~10%, if you waste even $100 on fraudulent clicks, that translates to a lot of lost revenue.
Protective Analytics is not just about protecting the integrity of your data, but your acquisition spend and your revenue streams too.
Start Protecting Investment Across All Channels
Once you’ve protected your traffic data from invalid traffic on one acquisition channel, the focus should then be protecting your investments across all channels.
For example, you can build an invalid audience based on your Google data and push that to Facebook. This means, before you ever run a Facebook campaign, you have a pre-defined list of bad actors who you don’t want to see your ads.
The effect of this is that when you launch a campaign, it’s immediately more effective. By automatically minimizing invalid traffic, your budget will not only be proactively protected, but you’ll have to spend less time iterating.
Through harnessing a cross-platform approach to protecting your investments, you can collate all your clean click data in one centralized system, analyze it in the context of the bigger picture, and then push out more impactful changes.
See Protective Analytics In Action
Protective Analytics isn’t something far-off in the future: you can use it to impact your PPC campaigns right now.
Whatever platform you have paid investments on, we can show you what difference this technology can make to your ROI – book a demo to see it in action.
