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All Rights Reserved Subscribe | Sign In BETA This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here More From Forbes Jan 3, 2021,10:26am EST Digital Advertising Harms Society. Here's How Jan 1, 2021,09:33am EST Digital (Money Laundering, Tax Evading, Terrorist Funding) Advertising Jan 1, 2021,04:50am EST Marketers Prepare For The Shift Into 2021 Dec 30, 2020,04:06pm EST Welcome To Hyperreality: Where The Physical And Virtual Worlds Converge Dec 30, 2020,10:48am EST What Marketers Can Learn From How SmartPower Has Leveraged Consumer Insight For Growth In The Sustainable Energy Market. Dec 30, 2020,10:31am EST In Conversation With Whereby: Embracing Full-Time Global Remote Working For Growth In 2021 Dec 30, 2020,10:23am EST In Conversation With Habitual - What Does The Future Look Like For HealthTech Into 2021? Dec 30, 2020,09:23am EST Marketers, You Deserve More In 2021 Dec 30, 2020,08:00am EST Forbes Marketing Awards 2020: Stop Hate For Profit Edit Story Jan 2, 2021,09:06am EST| When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why? Dr. Augustine Fou Dr. Augustine FouContributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. CMO Network I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I audit campaigns for fraud. * Share to Facebook * Share to Twitter * Share to Linkedin When P&G turned off $200 million of their digital ad spending, they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes [1]. When Chase reduced their programmatic reach from 400,000 sites showing its ads to 5,000 sites (a 99% decrease), they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes [2]. When Uber turned off $120 million of their digital ad spending meant to drive more app installs, they saw NO CHANGE in the rate of app installs [3]. When big brands stopped spending on digital ads, nothing happened. Even further back in time, in 2012, eBay turned off their paid search ad spending, and saw NO CHANGE in sales coming from those sources [4]. Why? Does that mean that digital advertising doesn't work? Or does it mean something else? When a small business owner doing Facebook advertising turned off FAN (Facebook Audience Network), he saw the number of ad impressions plummet by about 90%. He also saw the number of clicks drop dramatically and the effective CPM (cost per thousand) prices go up. But the sales of his music and merchandise went back up, despite getting far fewer clicks, buying 90% less quantity of ad impressions, and spending less on ads overall. Further, the discrepancy between the clicks reported by Facebook advertising and the number of arrivals on his website, reported by Google Analytics, vanished. In other words, the number of arrivals on his website started to match the number of clicks reported on his Facebook ads. In another example, a small business owner turned on a Google Adwords campaign and immediately saw a dramatic increase in traffic coming to her site. Any marketer would be ecstatic at how "well" and immediate the digital ads worked, right? Well, she was not. Looking at Google Analytics on her own site, she saw a 118,600% increase in Android devices coming to her site, and not much else. And those Android visitors were mostly "bouncing" -- leaving after a few seconds. When she un-checked the checkboxes that allowed ads to run on "search partners" and "display network," she saw this anomalous Android traffic mostly vanish. Did this harm her ecommerce sales? No. What the heck is going on? Big brands turned off millions of dollars of digital ad spending, and saw no change in business outcomes. Small businesses tuned their digital marketing and reduced the number of ad impressions, clicks, and traffic to their sites, but saw business activity go up, instead of down. Digital marketing works; but the vast majority of impressions and clicks are from bot activity currently. MORE FOR YOU Digital Advertising Harms Society. Here's How 25 Of The Most Customer-Centric Companies From 2020 Digital (Money Laundering, Tax Evading, Terrorist Funding) Advertising Much of the problem with digital advertising today stems from marketers' obsession with big numbers. But big numbers of ads and clicks do not translate into more business activity and sales. They are just large numbers in dashboards and spreadsheets. Marketers could be spending far fewer dollars and getting the same levels of business outcomes; or spending the dollars more smartly in digital and getting even more business outcomes than they are now. How? Some brands paused digital ad spending in 2020, due to the pandemic. If they saw no change in business outcomes, they can be very selective in what spending they turn back on, because those expenses were not driving incremental business anyway. Other advertisers reduced the number of websites and mobile apps showing their ads by going to a strict include-list. This prevents the vast majority of fly-by-night fake sites and mobile apps from sapping their digital ad budgets. And finally, smart advertisers should run more controlled experiments like eBay did in 2012 and prove to themselves what portion of digital advertising truly drives incremental business outcomes, versus the portion of the spending that is just wasted to bot activity. Be sure to read the details of how eBay ran the controlled experiment in the Harvard Business Review article: Did eBay Just Prove That Paid Search Ads Don't Work? Through these experiments marketers large and small made digital ads work better for them. Chase did not need to show their ads on 400,000 websites, when showing ads to humans on 5,000 yielded the same outcomes. Small business owners did not need to buy millions of ad impressions, when buying 1/10 the quantity yielded more sales. Nowhere else is the phrase "you get what you pay for" more applicable than in digital marketing. If you are buying large numbers of low-cost ad impressions from programmatic channels, you're likely getting ripped off instead of doing digital marketing. Run your own experiments -- give your digital ad spending a "time out." It'd be "fou" ("crazy") if you don't. And, if you have experienced this yourself, or have stories of your own, please reach out and let me know. I love hearing more about how marketers big and small saw and solved ad fraud themselves, without using any specialized fraud detection tech tools -- just common sense, analytics, and a healthy dose of skepticism. Further reading: 'Virtually All Fraud'--Were You The Perp, The Conduit, Or The Sucker? Fraudsters Cheat By Tricking The Reporting To Look Awesome How To Find Bot Traffic With Google Analytics Hand in protective latex gloves pressing pause button on the virtual screen getty Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. Dr. Augustine Fou Dr. Augustine Fou I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I help marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud that isn't caught by widely used ad verification services. I have ... Read More I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I help marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud that isn't caught by widely used ad verification services. I have witnessed the entire arc of the evolution of digital marketing, since the mid-90's. I taught classes in digital strategy at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Rutgers University's Center for Management Development. I have worked on the "client side" for American Express, and on the "agency side" as Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom's Healthcare Consultancy Group and SVP Digital Strategy Lead at McCann Worldgroup/ MRM Worldwide. I started my career in New York City with McKinsey & Company. Read Less * Print * Reprints & Permissions [ ]