Closing in on Effective Advertising
When it comes to advertising, you can teach an educated consumer a new trick, but you can’t teach them old tricks. The advent of the Internet and digital advertising has meant that consumers now have more tools than ever before to avoid ads. Fake clicks generated by bots, the rise of ad blockers, and GDPR all make it easier for consumers to dodge ads — so advertisers need the next big thing. Creative content is no longer enough; now advertisers need objectively-defined metrics of content effectiveness to be able to measure how well their marketing dollars are spent on each promotion. With these metrics in place, marketers can be confident that their efforts are translating into real returns for their bottom line.
In other words, advertisers are closing in on effective advertising.
Below is a list of 10 deceptive ad practices that marketers need to stop using — and five advertising trends that will help them get there.
1. Ad targeting: If you just can’t rely on an ad’s performance to determine what you should buy, then you have no choice but to resort to the kind of intrusive advertising known as "targeting." You see, this kind of ad can be very precise: It knows your age, gender and identity based on which computers it runs through, so there’s no way for it to go wrong when showing you a specific advertisement. But accuracy isn’t guaranteed on the Internet. No matter how targeted your ad is, it’s possible that other parties — such as website owners who sometimes work on the sly to install tracking cookies or even typosquatters (those who register a misspelled version of your brand’s name as a domain) — can spoof your ad.
2. Persuasion: In Facebook’s world, persuasion is used to determine what kinds of posts users should see in their newsfeeds. You see, this metric calculates "the likelihood of taking an action based on the influence of your post.” It’s based on a combination of "three key audience actions: watch, comment and share,” and it all sounds great — if you ignore the fact that it doesn’t measure actual "conversions.”
3. Engagement: One of the biggest lies of engagement is that it’s an indicator that you should buy an ad. But this isn’t true! In fact, some companies now use engagement as a way to measure how effective their ads are without ever asking for a sale or even information about their performance. This approach is misleading, wrong and, at best, a fatally flawed way of determining the success of your marketing efforts.
4. Interaction: If your ad has a call to action, how will you measure how well consumers are clicking through to your website or purchasing your product? This is where interaction comes into play. The best advertising metrics take into account the 'interaction' between your ad and the consumer that you want to see happen. And that’s where this metric becomes critical: Interaction measures how well your ad was able to generate an action in a given time period.
5. Click through rate: Another misleading metric is return on investment (ROI), which refers to the monetary value of an investment such as a paid advertisement or media buy. The problem is that there’s no direct link between money spent and ROI — nor can there be when you don’t know anything about "conversions.” What this means is that every time a consumer clicks on your ad, there’s no way to tell whether they were actually interested in your product in the first place or if they just made a mistake and clicked out of confusion or irritation.
6. Persuasion score: This is where Facebook gets you because it has been proven that a high Facebook Persuasion Score (FPS) is dangerously correlated with lower click-through rates and lower conversion rates. The thing is, Facebook doesn’t publish this data, so you have to take their word for it. As BuzzFeed pointed out in a recent article, the social network has taken to selling advertising based on a mysterious algorithm that is touted as “100% predictive of conversions.”
7. CTA: This is the ad itself. These are ads that can ask you to click through to your website or purchase an e-book, but they aren’t really an indicator of conversion rates — especially if you don’t know how many people click on them.
8. Modeling: If you’re not using modeling properly, you can easily end up throwing away your money. And no one is going to want to hear about how models aren’t reliable indicators of conversion rates or ROI — especially since this is a basic fact of online advertising that everyone seems to have forgotten. But it’s important to remember that models are used to predict what types of ads will perform well in an online environment. But as an ad itself, a model is just another unreliable indicator for measuring the success of your marketing efforts — one that can completely skew decisions about how many ads or promotions you should be running in the first place.
9. Attribution: Attribution isn’t just about measuring conversions. It’s also about establishing causality between your ads and websites, which is critical because it means you can understand what kinds of sites and users are most likely to convert — without having to rely on anyone else’s (or even your own) judgment. Attribution works by comparing all the different variables that predict conversion, such as the number of times you visit a site or the engagement with your ad, then isolating the ones that have a positive impact on conversions.
10. Ad fraud: This is the one metric that you don’t want to see at all. Basically, it’s the measure of your ad performance that will help you prevent and detect ad fraud. It measures how many times your ad was shown to a given audience, how many different devices it was seen on, and how often those devices behave in a way that is unusual for the target device — or when your own ads appear in situations you don’t expect them to appear in.
5 Advertising Trends That Will Help You End Ad Misrepresentation
We’ve known for a long time about the dangers of false advertising. So why are advertisers still misusing metrics when they have access to more reliable measures? The answer is simple: because they don’t know any better.
Conclusion
We’ve all seen the disasters that happen when marketers don’t get their advertising metrics right. They lose money, and a lot of it, too. The consequences are often real people getting hurt too. Why, then, are we continuing to allow these situations to occur?
To solve this problem, we need to stop believing marketing metrics are accurate indicators of anything. Instead, they should be seen as a guide: a tool that can help lead you down the right path but is not intended to be the ultimate solution to your marketing challenges.