Should Canadian marketers be more concerned about online ad fraud?
November 5th, 2014 | ACA Team,
By Jessica Yared, ACA staff
Stories of online ad fraud continue to dominate headlines in the marketing industry – click-fraud and delivery of advertisements to websites outside campaign guidelines are just two such issues facing marketers right now. While these issues are a worldwide phenomenon, the ACA wanted to find out what Canadian marketers are thinking, planning and experiencing in regard to protection of their online advertising investments.
For the September/October Marketer’s Pulse report, ACA received responses from 47 Canadian marketers representing a cross section of industry sectors and marketing/MarCom spending levels on questions relating to this very topic. Overall, the report found that Canadian marketers have limited experience with the issues, which is likely the reason why there is a moderate level of concern from advertisers (5.9 on a 10 point scale).
Only 10.6% of the respondents said they had experienced online ad fraud, while almost 30% simply did not know if their campaigns had been subjected to fraud or not.
Is the moderate level of concern and the lack of experience with ad fraud due to the fact that Canadian marketers are simply not investigating these issues? Likely, yes. The report found that only one-third of marketers use an auditing service at least some of the time to validate the delivery of their online campaigns.
While the vast majority (91.3%) of marketers reported that they work directly with an agency to do their media buying, as opposed to directly with a vendor or handling it internally, it is encouraging to note that most don’t believe it is the agency’s sole responsibility for the protection of their ads from online fraud . In fact, 58.6 percent of advertisers believe that it is a responsibility that should be shared between the agency and client.
So should Canadian marketers be more concerned about online ad fraud? In a word, yes. The Wall Street Journal published an article in March 2014 stating that 36% of all web traffic is considered fake. With those sorts of numbers, marketers need to be more invested in auditing the delivery of their campaigns in order to detect fraud, as well as take steps to achieve more transparency in order to ascertain exactly how their ad dollars are being spent.
The full results of the Marketer’s Pulse survey are available to ACA members and panel participants, and by subscription to others. The executive summary of the report is available to all.
