Bots Don’t Buy: A better approach to digital display ad planning and buying

The digital ad display market has been plagued with issues, but it should still be an important channel for all marketers, both to build sales and to build brand.

The challenge is to overcome 5 problems:

1. Bots eating ad budgets

· According to Google, 56% of ads are never seen by a human

· A study by Forrester found 69% of brands spending $1 million per month reported that at least 20% of their budgets were being lost to digital ad fraud

2. Lack of respect for people's privacy

· an industry focused on surveillance has created the largest consumer boycott in history...ad blockers

· at the same time, new privacy regulations in Europe, the US and Canada demand transparency and restrict the use of personal data

· Google will deprecate the third party cookie in Chrome browsers in the near future and Apple's approach to email and ad permissions will greatly restrict some common practices

3. Bad, unreliable measurement and attribution

· digital attribution tools impose a rule on clickstream data, vs using that same data to intelligently determine cause and effect.

· some digital attribution tools pretend offline media doesn’t even exist!

4. Targeting without context

· When marketers don't develop media plans with synergy in mind...how channels can reinforce each other, vs cannibalize...budgets are wasted

· cross-channel impacts can add a double-digit boost to performance...added impact without added budget

5. No forecast capability

· common digital planning tools are not predictive at all, let alone predictive of the incremental lift digital can have in the presence of offline channels

Crater Lake is pleased to announce we are launching a solution to these problems. Since bots don’t buy, our models will act as filters to avoid ad fraud. These models focus on signals (plentiful in the digital ecosystem) that differentiate human traffic, associated with purchases, from click traffic from bots…that never buy. These patterns allow us to focus digital ads on target audiences that are disproportionately driving sales volume lift and avoid audiences that will spend little to nothing with your brand.

In addition, our new predictive and optimization models are designed to drive incremental sales from digital ad buys. Since we will use privacy compliant data, we avoid making the problem of invasive tracking worse. And since our models don’t need personal tracking to determine cause and effect, we can help you avoid regulatory problems...and keep a cleaner conscience. Most importantly, these models integrate data from offline media, so that we can quantify digital ad lift without making attribution errors. We also, in this way, take full advantage of the synergies that exist between channels that are hard to measure but powerful in effect.

We believe the digital display marketplace can be rehabilitated; and turned into a reliable growth engine for your brand. To find out more, contact us here.