Modern campaigns have to be fully individualized if they’re going to resonate with consumers, a complex problem made all the more challenging by unreliable data.
Today’s digital consumers are a hard group to please. For a marketing campaign to engage them in a meaningful way, it must directly address their specific needs or situation, almost as if it was created for them and only them. This increasingly high standard helps explain why click-through rates on display ads are at an astoundingly low 0.1% industry-wide, according to Relevance.
In large part, these heightened expectations can be blamed on the shift to data-driven marketing. The troves of information available on consumers preferences has enabled marketers everywhere to anticipate those consumers’ needs, who now in turn expect nothing less, reports Anderson Collaborative. Unfortunately, meeting that demand has become increasingly difficult for marketers, who face the growing challenge of parsing meaningful insights from opaque or misleading data.
Fraud
Ad fraud in particular is proving to be a monumental problem for anyone in the digital media business. Bot traffic is at an all time high, and the Association of National Advertisers estimates that more than $40 billion of advertising spend will be wasted on nonhuman digital traffic in 2025.
According to Ron Amram, VP of media at Heineken USA, video is the channel that advertisers need to be most worried about. “Right now, the most concerning fraud is in the digital video space, specifically regarding high-end content,” he told AdWeek. “Everyone assumed that fraud was more prevalent in the dark underbelly of digital and not in higher-end video content.” In other words, ad fraud is pervading all spheres of digital advertising, and no platform is safe.
But beyond wasting marketers dollars, ad fraud also muffles a campaign’s impact because as much as 37% of the traffic may be non-human. This means the data that marketing teams use to inform and tweak their campaigns isn’t actually representative of what is going on with their campaigns and consumer engagement, and is therefore useless.
Misleading Information
This is all very similar to the way that “entangled sessions” can provide marketing teams with highly misleading information. When multiple people with distinct interests — a couple for example, or siblings — use the same account or computer to search for their respective interests, Google and other search engines struggle to discern that the searches were made by different individuals.
This means that the results may be wildly different than if the searches had been conducted from different devices, and makes accurately identifying those consumers’ interests to hone messaging much more difficult. Similarly, the fact that 8% of internet users account for 85% of ad clicks completely skews the data, limiting the value of a campaign’s metrics.
Visibility
Issues with visibility (and viewability) make mining relevant data equally challenging. Last year, according to SQ Magazine, 600 million internet users accessed their X accounts every month, which marketers understandably took to mean that X would be an excellent platform to reach potential customers. Yet, a study conducted by Cowen and Company found that almost one-quarter of X users never see an ad at all. Of those that do see an ad, only 3.1% said the messaging was relevant or insightful.
However, perhaps nowhere is visibility more of a problem than with display ads, where up to 81% of internet users tune out advertisements in a phenomenon known as banner blindness. Moreover, an estimated 31% of ads that register an impression can’t be viewed by users at all! It’s no wonder that marketers are struggling to improve the relevancy of their ads across any number of channels and platforms.
While the digital landscape has empowered marketers with more data about consumers and more tools with which to reach them, it has also made it much harder to engage them effectively. As frustration with ad fraud continues to build, marketers will increasingly seek out new solutions that can effectively react to data and distinguish bots from consumers, enabling industry professionals to harness the full potential of the internet in each of their unique campaigns.
