Every year, billions of dollars are spent on ad fraud. In 2019 alone, click fraud and accidental clicks used up between 45% and 95% of ad spend, costing advertisers over $40 billion. Without a solution, this number is expected to grow to over $100 billion worldwide by 2023.
Why the range? To date, there are no standards for how this data is measured, collected, and reported. However, even at 45%, this waste is unacceptable, and innovation is required.
A great statement in an article by peoplescience reads: “We all know that if we don’t acknowledge a problem, we can’t find a solution. It seems that the reverse is true, too. If we don’t acknowledge a potential solution, we can’t address the problem.”
Focusing on solving ad fraud from the bottom up is the top priority. This means re-inventing the decades-old system for how display ads currently function.
Data should be the driving factor informing ad creatives for display advertising. But what kind of data?
In display advertising, a key driver for increasing campaign ROI is leveraging data to learn what type offads invoke the best customer engagement within specific audiences. Yes, data is king, but it can also be our worst enemy when it tells an incomplete story.
Since 1994 with the origin of display ads, ad spend ROI has focused on performance metrics such as CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost-per-click). What if measuring clicks is actually the enemy here?
Since ad fraud – comprised of accidental clicks and non-human (bot) interactions – impacts 45-95% of ad spend, measuring clicks in a campaign is essentially useless. It doesn’t address the end game, which is whether ads drive real customer engagement.
No matter how much A/B testing you do or how robust your attribution models are, without eliminating ad fraud activities you can never with confidence tell the complete story of your campaign performance.
Advertisers are Waking Up
Setting aside the doom and gloom of display advertising, the good news is that the future of display advertising is changing. A few giant advertisers have blocked agencies from forming consortiums and have publicly criticized the industry for mismanagement of billions in advertising dollars.
One example is Procter & Gamble (P&G) who in 2018 announced that it would move a portion of its media, production, and creative work in-house. After one year, nearly 30% of its $7B global media spend was planned in-house, resulting in more flexibility in how P&G presents its portfolio and ensuring more effective oversight on the use of ad budgets. P&G even decided to reduce its digital ad spend by $200 million and saw no impact on business outcomes. Why? Because bots don’t make purchases!
Enter TransAd.
Our ‘In-ad’ landing page eliminates the need for clicks-throughs. Thus, bots serve no purpose, and ad fraud goes away. Absent clicks-through, what might you measure?
How about measuring human interactions in real-time? Actual leads captured within the ad itself? Even purchases made within the ad? Our next generation adtech allows you to measure all of these and opens up a world of creative opportunities.
This “bright future” is not a someday thing, it is available today. It’s all achievable with TransAd, the first ‘In-ad’ landing page. Eliminate wasted spending due to ad fraud, capture more leads, and increase customer engagements without increasing your ad budget by a single dime.
