Digital advertising is a form of advertising that employs internet as the medium of promotion of goods and services. Organizations place their advertisements on websites all over the internet based on their preferences.
These ads are placed through several online advertising channels available to place ads and manage them using various tools.
The advertisers can choose the ad format as well as the page placement of the ad to ensure that it grabs maximum eyeballs from their potential customer base.
These ad channels obviously charge the advertisers for this service. There are various metrics in place by which the advertisers are charged.
As the internet becomes crucial in the marketing communication mix, numerous new advertisers are coming up on the scene every day looking for an advertising channel that is ideal for their needs.
While choosing an ad platform, digital marketing managers and entrepreneurs go for one that fits their customer profile, their advertising budget and suits the market conditions prevalent at the time.
For traditional service providers like doctors or lawyers, a pull strategy works best and can be served well with search network campaigns on Google or Bing.
Their customers search for specific requirements and are well aware of the service. But for newer businesses that customers are not aware of, a push strategy-based display ad will be more eye catching. Hence, they would gain better from something like a Google Display Network campaign.
Advertisers have multiple options to choose from, like Facebook for selling lifestyle products or LinkedIn to target enterprise customers. However, paid online advertising is fraught with challenges.
Issues around viewability of the ads, choice of media metrics, proper placement of ads and transparency have been festering in the digital advertising world since the beginning of digital advertising.
Recently, Marc Pritchard, Procter and Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer lambasted the digital ad industry for creating a poor experience for the consumers of their channels.
He pointed out to internet giants like Facebook and Google for the lack of transparency on the performance of advertising campaigns on their platform and the presence of an uneven quality of ad space inventory.
He also declared that as a CEO, he does not want to waste his organization’s time and money on a poor media supply chain and asked the digital ad industry to fix these issues.
When giants like Procter and Gamble face hygiene issues, it speaks a lot about the intensity of the problem. Brands do not have visibility or control on where exactly their ads are running.
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It is a basic minimum requirement that the marketers want their ads to run on contextually relevant websites and in a ‘brand-safe’ environment. However, ad channels provide no safeguards in this matter.
Ted Ives, CEO of SEMCopilot – a company that makes software for PPC account managers, opines that Facebook’s ad channel needs various fix ups to make running of paid campaign both easier and fruitful for a campaign manager. Basic issues like not being able to edit the title and description of a saved but unpublished post irk digital marketers constantly.
To have full control, they would need to create a duplicate copy of the post which is a tedious process. A significant gap lies in the reporting provided by Facebook.
Ives seems to echo the sentiment of several other CEOs when he mentions that the Facebook Ads’ reporting does not provide detailed breakouts of performance by site or placement, instead Facebook shows it by channels such as Facebook, Facebook Audience Network etc.
This lack of transparency is misleading and does not help a marketer.
Moreover, there is an ad fraud problem that marketers are wary of. According to the retired CEO of Hoffman/Lewis Advertising, Bob Hoffman, digital ad fraud worth $7.5 Billion happened in June 2013 which had increased to $8.2 Billion per year as per Interactive Advertising Bureau’s December 2015 report.
This fraud can be accounted to infringed content, non-human traffic and malvertising related activities.
Paid advertising through advertisement platforms helps give fast results to brands who wish to take themselves to a larger audience.
Creating these campaigns and making them live is a quick process and advertisers can target specific demographics.
In spite of these benefits, the issues regarding measurement metrics and transparency of paid online advertisement platforms are on top of CEOs minds and need immediate redressal.
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