Frauds that Have Ruined Digital Marketing

An Indian large credit card marketer found that 30% of his leads were fraudulent when he calls them up to verify. Neither of them had filled any form for a credit card, but their contact details were still updated on forms.

Moreover, a fintech player MobiKwik’s CEO Bipin Preet Singh said in a recent interview to BrandWagon that he does not expect monetisation to revolutionize digital ads as a lot of frauds have been occuring in the digital ad industry such as misalignment of incentives, overbilling and fake traffic which ruins everything.

According to experts, ad frauds could run into crores of rupees for large marketers. Ad fraud comprises 10-30% of all digital advertising done in India, but the most common are bot fraud and click fraud.

Recently, Yahoo’s detection system find out 20-40% non-human traffic on its ad tech platform BrightRoll DSP. A high number of frauds have occurred in the mobile market as smartphones are rolling in. Fraudsters get paid for bot clicks, farmed leads, fake customers, and incentivised installs.

Ad fraud is an incidental drawback or a major issue. You can call it a dark side of the digital marketing industry. Fraudulent clicks can consume a major chunk of the budget of a cash-strapped startup, spoiling the entire business. Therefore, it is a major constraint on innovation and economic growth.

Google Business Listing Scams

Usually, small business owners receive this call. An unsolicited person claiming to belong to Google, calls or sends an unsolicited email with a message concerned with your Google Business Listing problem. Unless you are spending a lot of money on Google Adwords, Google won’t call you about Google business listing. Google My Business is a service that comes for free; therefore, if anyone call for help to resolve their business listing problem, usually, Google remains unresponsive to queries.

If Google is not calling, then who calls you.

You receive these calls from unethical people who make wrong use of the Digital Marketing vertical. Irrespective of hand to hand combat to aware people, some organizations still get attracted towards their fake claims. They steal or update the business listings of others for the sake of their clients’ gain.

The way out to this is to not to respond to such calls.

Fake accolades/testimonials

Now, big enterprises take advantage of digital marketing scams. In an era of digital marketing, you can fabricate everything to look like something through various means. Relying on awards, alumni and testimonials do not ensure quality of work.

Leading magazines( won’t mention the names) are ready to feature you on cover pages just for a few bucks.

Similarly, if an organization highlights a big list of clients on its website, then you cannot say it is reliable to work with. Do you know whether it has worked as a major client or just got a subsidiary project? To display the quality of work, many brands even fabricate testimonials on their own.

You can shrug off all these scams by asking for a strategy report to evaluate their performance. Right ones won’t refrain from your answers while providing required documents.

Everyone has a Google certificate

I am aware of Google certification courses but not of people who take it. Google’s assessments are online where only a timer ticks throughout the exam. No wonder, anyone can hire an expert or browse online for answers to pass the exam.

This trend is common, and now everyone has access to Google’s certificates. Finding out who are legitimate is not easy, but an employer can certainly ask questions to judge a person’s knowledge. Scammers will try to convince you, but it’s up to you to invest in wisely.

Danish Wadhwa is a strategic thinker and an IT Pro. With more than six years of experience in the digital marketing industry, he is more than a results-driven individual. He is well-versed in providing high-end technical support, optimizing sales and automating tools to stimulate productivity for businesses.