The main objective of digital marketing is to provide regular optimization efforts. Though the marketing dynamic is changing now and then, it still strives to follow the same motto– a constant cycle to learn and improve your strategies to flourish business in the digital world. The never-ending desire to convert visitors into potential leads drives marketers toward a broader prospect of technology. But with the pace of technology, the number of fraudsters in the advertising and marketing industry is also increasing, making them a potential threat to businesses’ growth.
After our exclusive conversation with Faisal Abidi, the co-founder of a prominent venture RNF Technologies, we understood how the company’s marketing team uses advanced technology to protect its brand from falling victim to fraudulent actors. But there are still a few marketing companies still unenlightened of the nefarious activities carried out by fraudsters in the marketing realm, making them unaware of the adverse problem of the industry.
For many business owners, fraud is an intricate module of doing business, and this article is written to flip this ideology for good. Fraudsters are using sophisticated human-like bots that can deceive a marketer by remaining undetected, eventually causing your ad performance to go lower and lower.
Threat Models Used By Fraudsters To Con Advertisers
Faisal Abidi, taking a dit at the fraud, shared a few threat models to help the marketers stay ahead of fraudsters and make an intelligent move against them. Every marketer must have time to determine how to combat marketing fraud and improve the ROI. It is only possible if the marketer is fully aware of the situation and is ready to fight to full potential if they wish to see positive business results.
Check out the below-listed threat models that fraudsters are using nowadays to cash in on marketers-
- Click Fraud:
One of the most used and well-known threat models is sophisticated bots to watch and click on ads that were initially meant to be monitored and clicked by humans. Click fraud occurs when actors with bad intentions use bots to feed ad activities for a campaign released by marketers. So campaigns highly dependent on less reliable inventory sources to reach their desired clicks and margin targets tend to witness a significant decline in conversion quality and rates.
- Lead Fraud:
Like the click campaigns, marketers promote aggressive customer growth by coming under pressure, increasing the likelihood of fraud activities on lead generation initiatives. A clever bot operating on the device of a real person can fill out forms with that person’s name and contact information, making it even more challenging for a marketer to identify the fraud. This only gets worse when cost-per-lead (CPL) payouts are high since fraudsters will go out of their way to steal the larger CPL payouts. Faisal Abidi, a marketing guru and proud co-founder of Phonato Studios, highlights the after-effects of lead fraud– marketers can see high lead counts. Still, the conversion rate remains at its lowest.
- Diffusing Marketing Efforts:
Black hat marketers from rival companies utilize click bots to start automated search inquiries, click on rival advertisements to waste rival budgets, and deflect targeted marketing initiatives.
All industries, including travel, automobiles, and small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), are the common targets of this threat model.
Tips To Fighting Back
Even after the relentless effort of performance advertising marketing leaders and security teams, it becomes challenging to tackle the terrible effects of bots. It is even harder to catch them as they keep changing their disguises. The smallest percentage of fraudulent activity can mess up the company’s campaigns, causing a long-lasting wound to the company’s annual spending and team’s efforts. This is the scary side of the marketing world. Still, as the adage goes– knowledge is power– one can combat the harmful effects of fraudulent advertising threats by harnessing the power of knowledge of the matter.