How to protect your ad spend from irrelevant traffic

Digital marketing is indeed something to get excited about. The reasons for this are because it’s instant, relatively simple and advertising is extremely cost-effective. However, a lot of companies are still trying to achieve digital marketing as well as social media success. Unfortunately, in the process they are spending far too much money on traffic that isn’t relevant.

The last twenty years or so have brought about a digital marketing revolution, with online advertising completely revolutionising the manner in which businesses are reaching out to consumers.

Ads on television as well as billboards on the side of the highway are giving way to online advertising. This is because the more traditional advertising methods are slowly fading away thanks to new habits that people are adopting. For example, a lot of individuals are preferring to stream video content as opposed to subscribing to paid-for television channels.

The benefits of digital marketing and online advertising

Not only does online advertising allow companies the opportunity to reach out to more consumers at a fraction of the price, it also allows organisations to target particular demographics. When this powerful benefit is combined with real-time analytics – as well as the ability to monitor advertising spend closely – it’s not surprising that online advertising has become so popular.

Online and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has seen a broad variety of advertising models during its history. Some of these are:

• Banners with fixed monthly fees, and
• Ads that run on a cost-per-impression basis.

Models are constantly evolving, which means that advertisers have the ability to tap into the potential of online advertising like they never were able to do before.

What is irrelevant (invalid) traffic?

The term ‘invalid traffic’ (which is also called Non-Human Traffic) (IVT) refers to traffic that is not created by humans but rather from the bot activity on a site. While IVT can consist of good bots – for example search engine crawlers that catalogue content for users to find – IVT is mostly used to refer to malicious and/or fraudulent bots.

Put another way, IVT refers to traffic which does not meet a particular ad-serving quality or, alternatively, completeness criteria. IVT otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic which could be included in measurement counts.

How to get around IVT

IVT is rampant in online advertising. In addition, it inflates an advertiser’s budget with ad clicks or impressions that were not seen by a correct user. Although this practice is all-pervasive, there are a number of ways that you can get around this. Here are some of them.

Insert Long Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are those keywords which have a low search volume with clearly identifiable search intent. The more generic that a keyword is, increased numbers of people bid on it. This means that the bid is higher.

Conversely, Long Tail Keywords are particular keywords which have a low search volume. This means that they are not prone to irrelevant search queries which saves you money on your ad budget. In addition, long-tail keywords tend to have an increased Quality Score which is the most effective way to lower the CPC.

Target the keywords which have low bids

When targeting the keywords which are appropriate to your company, search for keywords which  have fairly low bids. This is because these keywords may well have a lower cost per click (CPC ).

The CPC of keywords also depends on the competitiveness of your industry. Some of the keywords are extremely competitive which means that they have a high CPC. Try to steer clear of using competitive keywords.

Switch your bidding from automatic to manual. This is because manual CPC bidding allows you to have more control over your CPC.

Make use of negative keywords

Negative keywords also assist with lowering your CPC because these prevent your ads from being triggered by irrelevant search queries which can lower your click-through rate (CTR). A CTR which is healthy is vital as a lower CTR would lower your Quality Score so increasing your CPC.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about paid-for advertising and how this can help your business? If you do, then you definitely need to do our PPC course. For more information, please follow this link.