In today’s day and age more and more law firms are seizing the opportunities that online advertising presents. Pay-per click advertising on major search engines, display adverts across the web and more recently video ads are all growing rapidly in popularity.
More and more advertiser’s pounds are moving away from print and traditional marketing channels to online advertising; but in this golden age there are a few areas all media buyers should be aware of.
This blog post is intended to act as a cautionary guide for media buyers at law firms; it is a collection of articles detailing some of the pitfalls and issues affecting the online advertising industry in its current state. By understanding some of the prevalent issues, law firms can make calculated decisions on online advertising; they can ask the right questions from ad space vendors and most importantly improve their ROI with online advertising.
The internet of thingies
A good beginner’s guide which explains exactly what a ‘bot’ is, what it does and how it affects traffic to your website.
Bot traffic eclipses human traffic
http://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2013.html
In a similar vein to the Atlantic article above this article by Incapsula is a study on web traffic. The headline figure:
“It happened last year for the first time: bot traffic eclipsed human traffic”
Fake Internet traffic
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304026304579453253860786362
Now we get into the real nitty-gritty of the scale of the issue posed to online advertisers by fake traffic, in what the Wall Street Journal labels “rampant fraud in the industry”.
Transparency and ad placement
The issues facing online advertising have even hit the mainstream media.
“There is a major transparency issue when it comes to online ad placement; that should be apparent from the number of ad impressions that appear on malware or illegal phishing sites every year (nearly eight billion) without the knowledge of the advertisers paying for the space”.
Fraudulent video ads
Video ads are very much in-vogue currently; but these ads are equally if not more vulnerable to a number of fraudulent activities designed to part marketers from their cash.
“marketers are now contending with a deep bag of tricks that includes Web-crawling robots, server-based "drone pools" and the pixel-size video sites that has them paying for dubious Internet traffic.”
Who’s watching your online videos?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/business/the-great-unwatched.html?_r=3
This article is my pick of the bunch. It not only identifies the issues in the industry, it also identifies the behaviours and short-comings of media-buyers which have caused a lot of the current mess they now find themselves operating in.
“The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is, well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say, Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate.”
Dubious ad placement
There are certain sites that I’m sure you just don’t want your ads appearing on. This article tackles the growing concern of ad space purchased from ad exchanges and the lack of transparency on which sites your brand ends up actually appearing on.