How Many of Your Show’s Digital Ads Are Being Seen by Online “Bots” vs. Attendees?

Non-human traffic (NHT) from online robots, commonly referred to as “bots”, may be costing you more than you think.

“Bot fraud has advertisers paying for ads served to robots, not people,” said Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, during his keynote presentation at last month’s Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Media Leadership Conference.

When you consider this comment was made by the top marketing executive at a company that spends about $9 billion in advertising annually, it highlights the importance of the NHT issue.

As we buy tens of millions of online ad impressions for exhibitions and events, and are moving more and more attendee marketing dollars to digital media, ad fraud and NHT issues are certainly important to us.  We factor these realities into our media planning and buying, and are exploring new ways to minimize their impact on our clients’ digital ad spends.

How concerned should you be about NHT?

Consider these findings from a recent study conducted by the ANA and online fraud detection firm White Ops, which analyzed 181 campaigns in the U.S. from 36 ANA member companies that delivered 5.5 billion impressions on 3 million domains over a 60-day period – and decide for yourself.

> Bot fraud will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year across the world according to the report (based on applying U.S. bot percentages from the study to estimated global display and video ad spend).

> Bots accounted for 11% of all display ads and 23% of all video impressions observed in the study.  These are averages, actual numbers affecting specific campaigns or placements can be materially lower or higher, as reflected in the next point.

> “Significant bot levels affected all tiers and types of publishers. Premium, direct-buy display advertising campaigns at many well-known domains showed bot percentages higher than 10%,” according to the report.  For example, one CPG participant in the study purchased 230,000 impressions from a premium U.S. media company, and traffic from the site averaged 19% bots.

> “Bots faked all of the engagement and viewability metrics that we measured,” said the report’s authors.  “Sophisticated bots moved the mouse, making sure to move the cursor over ads.  Bots put items in shopping carts and visited many sites to generate histories and cookies to appear more demographically appealing to advertisers and publishers.”

> Bots consumed 19% of retargeted ads in the study which means you have the potential to waste money both on your initial ad buy to bots, and then again as you retarget these bots through additional ad spend – a potential DOUBLE WHAMMY here!

Factor NHT as well as viewability into your digital media planning and buying or else you risk wasting valuable ad dollars and missing out on ads which are actually seen by potential attendees.

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Posted on April 8, 2015