Why Click Fraud Should Concern You (Even If You’re Not Paying “Per Click”!)

Posted on October 26, 2017 by Scott Gordon

Click Fraud, the process whereby “bad actors” claim traffic that is being sent to a website, has been an industry problem for years. It can impact you, even if you’re not doing Pay Per Click advertising.

Many advertising teams measure digital advertising performance using a “Last Click” method. The Last Click method gives credit of the conversion to the publisher which served the last ad that drove the consumer to the website. This means that when performing campaign analysis, media budgets will be weighted artificially towards the wrong publishers (and the ad networks that support them).

Operationally, Click Fraud is accomplished by utilizing automated software programs (bots) and malicious code which make it appear that website traffic is coming from another source.

Business Insider, via a legal declaration from Elyse Burns of Vista Print, recently exposed how Click Fraud can occur:

“Burns navigated to the VistaPrint site via search and left the browser on overnight. The declaration states she discovered that, without taking any action, the browser had reloaded the webpage on its own. As a result, the visit no longer had tracking code reflecting that she had reached the site by search, but instead reflected the visit occurred as the result of [another advertising network’s] ad, according to the declaration.”

There are several ways to minimize the impact of Click Fraud (if not eliminate it all together):

Don’t count click traffic coming from self-proclaimed bots. Admittedly, true bad actors will mask their bots as human traffic … but discounting bot traffic from your attribution is such an easy process that there is no reason not to do it.
Watch click behavior. While all humans don’t “click alike”, they all have certain similar limitations and behaviors. For example, they likely don’t click on 30 ads an hour. Similar to the first suggestion, this is not a silver bullet. Savvy bad actors can program their bots to mimic human behavior. But it is an important characteristic to watch for.
Stop doing Last Click attribution. It is, quite candidly, a lazy way to measure campaign performance. A proper measurement and attribution program will take into consideration the multiple cross channel touch points a consumer has – both internally and externally – on the path to their ultimate conversion. And ideally that conversion isn’t a click, but something more tangible like an email newsletter sign up or a purchase.

Much like all technological fraud, Click Fraud is made up of a race between good marketers looking to accurately measure campaign performance, and bad actors actively looking to take advantages of technology loopholes.

The best that you can do is pay close attention to the website traffic which is driving your conversions, and watch for irregularities which could indicate fraud. Your website log traffic can provide vital clues as to the source and timing of each web visitor; a valuable tool for all of your campaigns (even email!).

The Future Of Big Data

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Scott Gordon

What Is Big Data?

Big Data defined: Extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

Quite simply, Big Data is the collection of all of the little things we do as humans. For marketers, this means the small actions consumers take and the influences they encounter as they move through the traditional marketing funnel. That marketing funnel in its most basic form is the journey a consumer takes – moving from awareness to interest to consideration to intent, evaluation, and purchase.

Big Data was once only available to select organizations with the resources to collect and analyze it. Big Data is now accessible to everyone, thanks in large part to technological advancements. These technological advancements have made collecting data from disparate online and offline sources, pinning that data to persistent universal IDs, and analyzing that data to better understand consumer behavior, easier than ever.

Why is Big Data Important?

Marketers are ever consumed with efficiently finding the right consumer, at the right time, and delivering the right message. The old adage in advertising used to be “I know that 50% of my advertising is working … I just don’t know which 50%”. Now, knowing which 50% isn’t good enough. Marketers need to know individual level data, such as “Who is the right consumer?”, “When is the right time to reach them?”, and “Which message will best influence them to convert?”.

Up until recently, collecting and analyzing the data necessary to answer those questions has been difficult and expensive. Now, thanks in large part to the ubiquity of Software As A Service providers specializing in data management and execution, it is easy to not only accurately collect greater amounts of consumer data from disparate sources (eg: social, mobile, display, email, direct mail, etc.), but also put that data to use.

These solutions have become so ubiquitous that even mid-sized companies can afford to collect and store vast amounts of consumer data, analyze that data to create more predictive consumer models, index those models against individual cross channel consumer identities to create audiences, execute those models in the form of targeted cross channel audiences, and then measure the results – both within and outside the click stream.

Does that sound complicated? It is! But now thanks to technology advances in advertising, almost any company can do it. Where companies had to rely on third parties and data collectives to generate data, they’re now able to collect and digest consumer data economically, at scale. The critical component has moved from data collection and storage to data analysis.

This isn’t a fully automated process. It still requires teams of “smart people” to implement. (Data Scientists have reached near celebrity status, commanding larger salaries and greater influence in the corporate structure.) Though those teams are smaller than there were before, and they have greater resources to make more informed decisions.

What Does The Future Hold?

As the accessibility of Big Data (and the solutions that support them) continues to grow, we’ll see several things:

Brands will collect greater amounts of data, as devices become more inter-connected and data storage costs continue to drop.
Brands will demand more access to their data. We’re seeing this now, as Consumer Product Goods (CPG) companies are demanding access to the supermarket shopping data of consumers who purchase their products using loyalty cards, and also access to person level measurement / attribution data from walled garden publishers like Facebook and Google.
As more first party data becomes available, certain third party data attributes will become more commoditized. Brands will realize the value of their consumer data in the open marketplace, and take steps to monetize it. We’re already seeing several adtech companies launch platforms to easily enable Brands to monetize their data.
A continued focus on accurate Identity. Pinning consumers to universal persistent IDs (at the individual and household level) across online and offline channels. This goes hand-in-hand with an increased effort towards identifying and tracking consumers at all stage of the marketing funnel (aka purchase lifecycle).
Leveraging Big Data to reduce the cost of customer acquisition. This is the ultimate goal of marketers … sell more for less. And as Big Data enables us to learn more about consumer behavior, we can expect the traditional marketing funnel to adapt as well.

SEO 3.0 – How to Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Scott Gordon

While the importance of ranking highly in relevant search engine queries hasn’t changed in the past 10 years, the process of Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO) has changed dramatically.

One of the foremost authorities on SEO, Moz.com, has published a beginners guide to SEO. This 58 page guide is ideal for business owners who are looking to understand the basics of SEO.

I think that it is one of the most comprehensive guides for SEO beginners that I’ve read in a while, and I highly encourage anyone who utters the word “SEO” in a conversation to read it.

Knowing that we’re all busy, and in the spirit of respecting your time, I’ve created a “cliff notes” version of the Moz.com Search Engine Optimization for Beginners guide (with my notes and comments, having optimized search engines for several years now). This is by no means a substitute for the full guide, which should only take you an hour or so to read. This summary will hopefully make digesting the full guide easier.

Throughout the guide you’ll notice a common theme, which I’ll paraphrase as “don’t try to cheat the system”. Your goal should be to execute a comprehensive digital marketing campaign that makes it easy for search engines to crawl your site and refer visitors to pages on your site that relate to their immediate query. While there are things that you can do to expedite this process, by no means does it happen overnight.

Chapter 1:

Search engines “crawl” your website from page to page, following links. So make sure that the search engines can easily go from page to page by making the link structure simple. They cannot follow search fields, so make sure that you provide links (ideally text links) that they can follow.

Search engines cannot interpret video, flash, nor images (yet!), so make sure that your webpages have lots of text, and use natural language.

Google recomends the following: “Google recommends the following to get better rankings in their search engine: Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as “cloaking.” Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate. Use keywords to create descriptive, human-friendly URLs. Provide one version of a URL to reach a document, using 301 redirects or the rel=”canonical” attribute to address duplicate content.”

Chapter 2:

Moz.com likes to say “Build for users, not for search engines”. I couldn’t agree with this more. You need to build an online marketing strategy that is natural, and as a bi-product is search engine friendly. Trying to engineer to only support search engines will only lead to your website being de-listed for SEO Fraud.

A search engine’s only goal is to deliver the most relevant answer to the person searching.

You should focus your content on answering questions. Searches fall into three categories: “Do” (I want to do something), “Know” (I want to know something), or Go (“I want to go somewhere – either an event or a webpage).

Search engines still drives a LOT of traffic to websites, and a majority of that traffic goes to the top listings in a search engine query … so it is worthwhile to spend the time / resources to ensure that your website ranks high in search engines.

Chapter 3:

Things that get in the way of search engines include online forms, duplicate content, and other items previously mentioned. Use common terms, make sure that your language is region specific (the Brits are known for spelling words with an S intead of a Z), and make sure that the language aligns with your primary target audience.

Remember that SEO is always evolving, which is another reason that you want to follow “white hat” (aka honest) approaches. You can check how a search engine reads your website by using SEO-Browser.com or Moz.com. Or you can look at Google’s text cache of the page.

The text in the link (eg: <a href = “website.com”>seo advice</a>) is important for SEO.

Use specific, and relevant, keywords. But don’t over abuse them. Make sure that the language is natural.

Chapter 4:

Moz.com recommends for keyword(s) / key phrases:

Use the keyword(s) in the title tag. Use them at least once. You can use them more than once, but remember to keep the language natural.
Use the keyword(s) / key phrases once prominently near the top of the page. For example, as the bolded header at the top of the page. Remember that search engines cannot read images, so make sure that it is “pure text”.
Several times (with different variations) throughout the rest of the webpage.
As part of the alt tag of an image.
Once in the URL of the webpage.
And as part of the Meta Description for the page. Search engines will pull from the Meta Description when creating the “sneak peak” which shows beneath the listing for your site in the query. Not only should the Meta Description include the keyword, but it should be written as a compelling call to action that drives the reader to go to the website!

Chapter 5:

Choosing the right keyword / key phrase is an artform. You need to choose keywords which are not only relevant to the search, but also aren’t so general that you won’t rank highly in the search query. There is an old saying “The riches are in the niches”, and you should think about keyword the same way.

Moz.com’s Keyword Analysis tool can help you understand the competition for a specific keyword or key phrase, and consequently how difficult it will be to rank highly for them.

Chapter 6:

As mentioned earlier, search engines are trying to give searchers the best possible results for their query. Generally, search engines like websites that are:

Easy to navigate and understand.
Provide clear information relevant to the query.
Designed for modern browsers, across numerous platforms (mobile, desktop, etc. ).
Deliver high quality, credible, and unique content.

Chapter 7:

Who links to you, and how they link to you, is important.

Trusted sites like Wikipedia (where there are a lot of communal editors who ensure the quality and accuracy of the content and links) carry a lot of value. Also .gov, .edu, etc. sites.
Related sites (sites that discuss a similar topic) carry value as well.
The Anchor Text is important.
The freshness and frequency of linking is important. This is not a “set it and forget it” activity.
And more recently social sharing is important.

The guide also discusses techniques you can use to build a strong, legitimate linking strategy.

Chapter 8:

This chapter discusses behind the scenes tools like Robots.txt and SiteMaps. These are things your webmaster should setup for your site to make it easier for search engines to crawl the site.

Chapter 9:

Chapter 9 discusses the “black hat” techniques that are likely to negatively impact your listing, like keyword stuffing, etc.

Chapter 10:

Chapter 10 covers the tools you should use to measure the success of your SEO activity. They include:

The search engine share of referring visitors (how many visitors are finding your site via search engines)
The terms and phrases that consumers use when finding your website.
The ultimate conversion ratio of search engine traffic, by keyword or key phrase.
And how many pages benefit from search engine referred traffic.

The chapter also covers which tools you can use to measure these benchmarks, and how to use the tools.