Digital Marketing

Ever felt like the influencer marketing industry has its own language? If so, this is the post for you.  If you’re just starting out in social media and influencer marketing, I understand if you’re a bit lost. You might be feeling like your marketing degree should have included a module…

I have written extensively about the fraud and waste in digital marketing today [1], [2]. This article is not about that. Marketers who have already begun to clean up their own digital campaigns are also starting to ask how to invest their ad budgets better (because of all the savings…

I know you violently disagree with me already, having just read the title. But stick with me and I will find “the rainbow after the thunderstorm.” And this is a test to see if you read the whole article, or just the headline. The 2020 Virus Last year, the virus…

I came up through the ranks as a search marketer. As a marketer, I still consider myself mostly search oriented (despite my day job as an ad fraud researcher). That’s because search marketing — both paid and organic — epitomizes digital marketing. Think of your own habits for a second.…

Belgium’s data-protection authority takes aim at collection of personal information in digital-ad auctions Tactics Google and other large online-ad players use in digital ad auctions violate European Union privacy law, investigators for Belgium’s – a European privacy regulator – wrote in an internal report, a preliminary finding with implications across…

You’ve just finished wrapping an online advertising campaign with the goals of creating awareness amongst your target market and generating new leads. Once you have the data, however, what should you look for to determine whether or not the campaign was a success? While it’s important to look at conversion…

 Credit: Illustration by Chris King When it comes to how much marketers lose to ad fraud, no one has a bleaker assessment than Augustine Fou. How bleak? “Between 1 percent and 100 percent. There are no 0 percent fraud campaigns, that just means you’re not seeing it,” says the former…

I’ve been asked continuously over the last twenty years “what’s a good click through rate, bounce rate, time on site, etc.” and more recently, “what’s a good IVT (invalid traffic) rate?” My answer has always been that industry wide digital advertising benchmarks are meaningless because they are not actionable, even…

“Digital advertising has never been more efficient and cost effective.” Many big brand advertisers that spend hundreds of millions in digital today think this. After all, their media agencies keep sending them excel spreadsheets touting how much more ad inventory they bought through programmatic ad exchanges and how much lower…

It’s 2020. Why the heck am I doing a digital ad fraud explainer? Well, in years past, the biggest brand advertisers would give their digital budgets to media agencies to spend for them. And they got glowing reports back showing how much quantity was purchased, the awesome prices they got,…