As we near Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you may already have a clear idea of what you want to get the most out of during these big shopping days. Businesses around the world, just like yours, are shuffling around the variations of deals that are likely to work best in their market — from hourly deals, early-bird sales, to last-chance offers.
Black Friday deals remain an excellent way to attract new customers. Businesses ramp up web and social media ad campaigns around huge discounts to penetrate the broader market. What most of these businesses often overlook, however, and with so much going on, is the threat of silent ad frauds attacking their marketing efforts.
Companies running Black Friday deals might record increased traffic and conversions than usual, but nearly one-third of what are considered organic online Black Friday shoppers are fake. When you run an ad campaign, the risk of click fraud doubles.
This article explores why you should protect your Black Friday campaigns from click and similar frauds, and how proactive measures can help your business around Black Friday and long after the shopping season.
Improved Data Quality
The accuracy of recorded marketing and sales data is now as important as the business itself. Quality data is arguably the key source of revenue for many of the world's top brands, from Amazon to Spotify.
Ad fraud affects both your existing customer data and your live campaign data. This infects all the decisions you make about your Black Friday ads, right down to what demographic you target and how you present your offers.
Analytical errors are one of the prime reasons many advertisers find the campaigns they run unprofitable — data skewed by the invalid traffic caused by ad fraud costs businesses a whopping $697 billion every year! It is obvious how flawed datasets tainted by fake users lead to expensive product decisions.
With Black Friday deals, where customers tend to be more price-sensitive, businesses must ensure they are making informed decisions about their ad campaigns.
Click fraud prevention tools ensure that your marketing decisions are based on accurate information. Valid clicks are recorded, while invalid ones are blocked. The tool saves you from blind strategies, troubled long-term revenue projections, and wasted ad spend during Black Friday promotions.
▶︎ Note: Spider AF has a robust "Invalid Click Blocker" that you are welcome to try. Yes, it is free for your first 14 days. No, you don't need to enter your card details for the trial. We know, right?
Increased Customer Retention Rate
For any business seeking the highest return on investment (ROI) for the least amount of money, the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) must be considered. With Black Friday, lowering CAC doesn't matter as much as acquiring customers with a high lifetime value (LTV) — once those vast discounts are factored in, it is easy to see why.
When a large chunk of your ad budget is spent reaching bots — an estimated one in five dollars if you don't protect your ads — you'll find that fewer resources are directed toward engaging new Black Friday customers. Hence, fraudulent traffic dilutes the quality of your traffic and affects how you interact with visitors. This lowers your LTV to CAC ratio.
Ad fraud prevention tools would ensure you're reaching real users rather than bots, helping you to both optimize your ad spend and better engage existing customers: increasing customer retention rate beyond the Black Friday season.
Lower Bounce Rate
Bot traffic makes it more difficult to measure and analyze how well your web pages are performing and whether changes should be made in anticipation of the traffic surge Black Friday is likely to bring — rewriting the copy of landing pages, tweaking product descriptions, etc.
Many companies invest a lot of effort and resources to establish their brands as industry leaders. They craft informative articles, whitepapers, and intriguing case studies around relevant topics. These companies could lose the only tool at their disposal to measure how well the market is resonating with the content they're churning out. It is strange to see years of diligent work lost to the oblivion of messed-up analytics because of a single Black Friday ad campaign.
Effective ad fraud prevention tools have a feature we at Spider AF call the "Bounce Rate Reducer." This feature does exactly what it says: reducing bounce rates by filtering out irrelevant, invalid, and unwanted traffic.
Cheaper Cost Per Click
If the right audience sees your ad, they are more likely to visit your landing page and convert. The quality score of your ad will increase as a result. The higher an ad's quality score, the lower its cost per click (CPC).
In essence, when your ads reach more relevant users and fewer bots or fake users, your CPC will go down. The cheaper your PPC ads get, the more people you can afford to reach, and the greater the opportunity to realize better return on ad spend (ROAS). Many marketers would happily linger for eternity in this loop.
Features like the "Ad Location Optimizer" in anti-ad fraud solutions would shield your ads against click farms and invalid data, which is incidentally crucial for landing hot leads.
Additionally, these tools vet such users by evaluating their profiles — at least we know that ours do. With the proper click fraud prevention tool, marketers should attain that ideal paradise loop both during and beyond Black Friday.
Protected Brand Image
Advertisers running Google Display Network (GDN) ads are at greater risk of getting their ads displayed on unsolicited websites. To have your website showing up on such sites around the biggest shopping event of the year is a PR nightmare.
Each year, the number of fake and shady e-commerce sites increases around Black Friday. It won't bode well for your business in general, nor for your Black Friday promotions specifically, if your ads are associated with bad actors. Companies have an easier time recovering from financial losses than regaining market trust once it has been lost.
Ad fraud prevention tools provide advertisers with everything they need to safeguard the image of their brands, utilizing machine learning models to clean up ad placements across GDN partners. Each facet of the ad fraud prevention tool works with the others to enable maximum protection of a company's brand image.
Conclusion
Ad fraud prevention tools provide advertisers with the resources needed to keep their companies' ad budgets in check and to receive a healthy return on their ad investments. Escaping the digital advertising curse — dealing with the menace of digital advertising fraud — is not an impossible task, but requires a deliberate effort.
Whatever you have planned for Black Friday promotions, your ads shouldn't be at the mercy of fraudsters. Strategic marketing necessitates advertisers to integrate these prevention tools. The use of click-fraud protection tools is not a luxury, but an integral piece of your advertising and marketing puzzle.
