In a highly competitive digital world, advertising is the key to making your business stand out among the rest of your competitors. Advertising is an investment not for the creation of a product but for its promotion. Promotion to the extent that your product or service becomes a household name. It makes people buy your product by creating awareness and fear of missing out. Mostly, persuasion and rationalized emotional rhetorics are their weapon.
A great number of advertising tools and agencies are roaming in the market to assist you in getting closer to your potential customers. But what if I told you that sometimes scammers disguise themselves as advertisers to rob businesses by bogus and false displays of stats and advertising tactics? Their false promises are nothing but the trap, and the bigger the promise, the bigger the scam.
Today, in this blog, UnityDiv will guide you on how to protect your business from advertising scams that not just cost you your money but also your image among the customers. So, let’s start the in-depth exploration of a topic of discussion;
First, What is Ad Fraud?
Advertising or Ad fraud refers to the phenomenon in which businesses get trapped in a fraudulent scheme that promises them the moon but gives in return not even a flashlight. In other words, they are the scammers who manipulate and use advertising platforms for their ulterior motives (motives that are detrimental to the interests of the businesses).
The stats of visible improvement shown by such fraud marketing agencies are not based on concrete and actual statistical evidence but are feigned by exploiting the existing loopholes in the Ad system. That means all their clicks, impressions, and conversions are fabricated.
- Types of Ad Frauds
| Click Fraud | Use of bots to get fake clicks on ads. With no real customers behind, such clicks never turn into conversions, which means the businesses are draining their budgets but to no avail. |
| Guaranteed Lead Scams | Fake and low-quality contacts are given to companies in the name of genuine leads using bots, click farms and various other illusionary tactics. |
| SEO Scams | SEO scammers use black hat SEO techniques like keyword overstuffing, sneaky redirects, and cloaking to give businesses overnight top positions on the search engines, damaging the business’s sites in the long run and putting them in the bad books of the algorithms. |
| Bogus Social Media Engagement | Fake digital marketing agencies uplift businesses’ social media profiles by way of fake likes, comments, and shares from sham accounts. Since such profiles have no intention to buy the products or services, they contribute nothing to business growth. |
| Simulated Metrics | Businesses are never able to gauge campaign effectiveness because of counterfeit metrics data showing fake progress. |
Advertising Scams Examples
- Click Bots: It is a software program that scans an ad and gives the impression that it is being viewed by accounts belonging to a human audience. They are easy to detect since they can’t mimic human behavior and always show a specific pattern. But, with evolving sophistication, they go unnoticed. The Wall Street Journal maintains that almost 28% of the website traffic will likely come from non-human actors and signals.
- Click Farms: The cheap workforce employed by an advertising agency or a competitor to give the fake impression of clicks on paid ads. Advertising agencies hire them because they imitate human browsing behavior, making them less likely to get charged for fraudulent advertising services. Meanwhile, competitors use the workforce to drain the company’s advertising budget on pay-per-click ads. After all, their ads will be generating clicks but no conversions.
- Fake Ad and Classified Scams: Not only will the scammers bring the business fake impressions, clicks, but also the fake clients and customers. They may contact you by email, Facebook messages, or text messages to show that they are genuinely interested in buying your products; however, they will leave without buying anything. They will also show fake ads for items you don’t sell, and sometimes of the items you sell but at a price much lower than the actual one.
Preventing Small Business Advertising Scams
Here are ways to help you bogus marketing agencies from genuine ones like UnityDiv;
- Do thorough research before hiring a marketing agency for your business promotion. Check the credibility by reviewing the reviews, testimonials, past work samples, website URLs, and layout.
- Remember, there is always something fishy when the offer is too good to be true. Yeah, don’t fall for the big promises. Nobody is going to bring down the moon for you because nobody can. If someone claims to offer unrealistic results in a short time, stop there and reconsider investing there.
- Check for the strategies they are using to bring you results. Verify whether you are using any black hat SEO techniques to uplift your rank on the Google search result page. Is there any non-human behavioral detection on the ads posted? Last but not least, monitor your ad performance to detect if there are suspicious patterns in the analytics reports, like sudden hikes in the clicks but without any tangible conversions.
Final Thoughts
Indeed, in an online world where there is a risk of scams at every step, entrusting your business to the hands of credible and reliable service providers is what almost every company is seeking. UnityDiv, as a professional digital marketing service provider, takes away all of your concerns. We have established ourselves in the market as a trustworthy partner, proven by the testimonials, reviews, and past work samples. Our team checks the website’s authenticity using ScamAdvisor and other such tools. We guarantee secure and transparent advertising solutions so that you get real results.
Remember, we take your success as our success. A satisfied and happy client is what helps us in long-term growth. That is why we always deliver results that match your requirements and contribute to your unprecedented growth. Contact us now for comprehensive digital marketing services if you want to save yourself from untrusty advertising companies.
