Bot farms have destroyed online digital marketing reputation?

Before going into the details of the "why" behind bot farms lets look at the history.

For a long time, digital advertising was considered rather safe and reliable. Marketers and media agencies were willing to pay to the sites to publish their ads. Running ad campaigns on online platforms had the potential to drive traffic and result in high conversion rates, like no other tool.

Around the early 21st-century bot farm and fraudsters came onto the scene. This soon spiralled out of control, with a lucrative scheme, click fraud and bot farms can generate millions in no time at all.

Consequently, with an increasing amount of spams, viruses, and bot farms invading the web, online advertising has been losing its reputation. The clicks are no longer quality and around 49% of them come from bots (Bot farms). So, it appears that most of the ads don't make their way to the user's screens. The payment for humans is wasted on malicious software that operates for the gain of crooks and cybercriminals.

Click Fraud and Bot Farms

One of the latest digital advertising studies claims that fraud traffic costs up to $7 billion dollars. Under such circumstances, marketers are reluctant to trust online advertising and pay for PPC display ads. More often than not, the ads don't even reach the users. The publishers or ad networks can easily imitate that your ad is up and running for the sake of you seeing it but in reality, don't publish it. And by now, you know where the clicks come from.

Accountability Is Another Part of the Problem

As customers, it is the right of the advertisers to have detailed information about the ads and how the publisher is handling them. After all, click fraud is not the concern of the advertisers. They pay to the publisher and expect the promised result. Accountability and transparency are important factors and the contract between the ad-buyer and the ad-seller indicates the former has the right information and it's the duty of the latter to provide that necessary data.

Digital Advertising Is a Great Tool And There Are Ways to Fix This Situation

It would be a shame to let such a resource slide away. Not everything is hopeless and even though cybercriminals do damage on a daily basis through bot farms and other methods, there are click fraud detection and prevention mechanisms.

First things first, building an open technology can solve the matter of transparency. Collaborative effort to eliminate click frauds can help significantly reduce the level of seriousness of the problem. Gathering all successful technology services that work toward click fraud detection will be great assistance to all the businesses that want to run effective ad campaigns.

Which means, there should be a big system that has third-party software and services that should be integrated into the mission of combating ad fraud.

Speaking of Third-party Software

You can't solve a problem if you don't know about its existence. Similarly, click fraud prevention will be impossible without proper detection. Third-party click fraud and bot farms detection software is the answer.

Take the example of ClickGUARD, the carefully planned algorithms inspect the clicks, determine the suspicious ones and automatically block them. Therefore improving the overall performance of your ad and putting it back on its track.

Completely giving up on online advertising is no good due to the intimidating fraudsters and bot farms. Moreover, there are real solutions to this cybersecurity run-out and with a collective effort of advertisers with a little push by click fraud prevention software will bring back the good reputation of digital advertising.