Unfortunately as everyone can attest, the practice has been less than stellar lagging the theory of offering the right advertising to the right audience by a wide margin. Look for news on a new car and car adverts will follow you for months. Visit a place somewhere and lo, it will feel like you never left the place weeks after weeks.
So why is targeting so lousy and ineffective?
A large part of the answer has to do with the other side of the equation. Click factories and platforms willing to count whatever to improve numbers and nurture a nascent field.
Online advertising is supposed to be better because targeting is easier and everything is measurable. That would certainly be the case if numbers were reliable. They are not! And the consequences are plain to see.
This may be on the verge of a major evolution if the article below is right. But in the end, right or wrong, it does not matter. Blockchain will eventually transform the sector like so many others by introducing foolproof distributed systems which will improve tremendously the reliability of transactions and allow the potential of data and measurements the become reality.
Read on.
Published on Zero Hedge, October 1st 2019
Just like everything else
that’s being disrupted, now we are looking at the ad serve industry. First let’s explain what the marketplace
concept for online advertising is.
Clients (Called Publishers) want to monetize their website with ads. Advertisers create ads on the
marketplace. They bid on traffic, which
is calculated per click. This is known
as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. The
exchange, or the marketplace, allows 2 sides to bid and offer just like a stock
exchange would, taking the difference as their fee. This model was pioneered by Google but now
almost every ad platform uses a similar model, including Facebook.
But it’s not so simple, as
there is an incentive for profit, there is an incentive for fraud. When someone believes they can get money for
free – here we go. Click click click money
comes. But it’s not so easy. Google will block Publishers who have
‘invalid clicks’ if they believe they came from the Publisher themselves or if
there was a bot used to “Game” the system.
In fact, According to Click Guardian, $7.2 Billion was lost to click
fraud in just 2 years:
Click fraud is one of the most talked about
issues affecting advertisers on Google and other Pay Per Click (PPC)
platforms. According to Click Guardian
$7.2 billion was lost to click fraud between 2016 and 2018. That’s a staggering
amount that millions of advertisers are losing to fraudsters and click
errors. So what is click fraud?
According to Google it is an illegitimate action such as an unintentional click
or a click resulting from malicious software.
In fact, Google chooses not to call it click fraud and calls it ‘invalid
clicks’ instead. That’s understandable considering the confusion surrounding
this topic and the various reasons why some clicks may be legitimate or an
error.
So this is an ongoing problem
in the industry, and we wanted to lay down the background before mentioning
this exciting solution. A company by the
name AdEx has developed an open-source, transparent, and fraud-proof solution
for display advertising. What’s exciting
about it is that they pay in real time on the Blockchain, so a click equals a
payment. Real time reporting and
settlement means that fraud is complex as it can be spotted immediately. And this can be done without giving up the
users privacy.
Our background in this space
is substantial, we started in 2006. Our
group has managed a remote SEO workforce of as many as 600 people, our monthly
SEO spend has been well over $50,000 for a single client. We’ve worked with companies big and small,
ranging from car dealerships with multiple rooftops to local restaurants. Content blogs, ecommerce, and more – they all
have the same goal: increase traffic for the lowest possible fees. The problem:
Google Ads works, but it’s expensive.
There is no way around inflation.
So we are hopeful that by
eliminating fraud, providing efficiency, transparency, and a high tech low cost
platform – costs of display advertising will decrease.
Display advertising is
perhaps the most important business tool for startups or online businesses, due
to its comparatively low cost. Wait,
didn’t we just say it’s expensive? It is
when compared with the cost of a cup of coffee, yet it’s still far cheaper than
the traditional media which is print, TV, and radio. Expect to spend millions on a TV ad and if
you go with the ‘cheap’ option expect to have your ad displayed at night next
to Ginsu infomercials.
The other alternative is SEO,
which again is hard and involves hundreds of microtasks such as Meta Tag
optimization too many to get into in this article.
The only drawback about AdEx
is that it’s still private and in beta, so we will be waiting with bells on as
they say, for the grand opening.
