Safe advertising campaigns: The most common forms of deception in advertisements

As is the case with SMS campaigns, as we have discussed in previous blogs, Advertising campaigns must also generate consumer confidence, and there are currently a number of practices and behaviours that seek to do the opposite. 

Therefore, we are going to discuss some of the most common deception practices in advertising campaigns, with the aim of knowing them and learning how to make safe and successful campaigns, as well as how to protect them. 

• Ad Stacking

This practice is also known as stacking of advertisements. This consists of placing the advertisements in such a way that they overlap or stack on top of the content of the page in question. 

These behaviours, while seemingly valid and revenue-generating, are anything but. Doing so not only entails a considerable financial loss for the advertiser, but can also lead to suspension or blocking for invalid traffic. 

Therefore, our advertising campaign should be based on well-published advertisements, occupying sufficient and necessary space to be visible, avoiding an abuse of advertisements on the same website. All this because A single advertisement will be much more effective than posting several through this technique, which can have serious and harsh consequences. 

• Invisible advertisements 

Another common practice is invisible advertising. This type of ad is created in very small pixel frames and loads when the website loads, but is not visible to users.

Thus, although this technique is not obvious and does not stand out, has virtually zero effectiveness. In this sense, we must not forget that, for the advertising campaign to be effective, we must have clicks and accesses through the advertisements, so, If it is invisible, it will be impossible for users to access through them. This results in a loss of money for the advertiser. 

Therefore, and in view of the lack of effectiveness of this technique, It is always best to create an advertising campaign in a normal, visible pixel frame so that any user can access it. 

• Fraud or click farms

This technique of deception consists in falsifying the clicks on the advertisements. This practice can be implemented through bots or through click farms where people work. Thus, The dynamics are the same, the only difference being that in some cases it is robots that create the clicks artificially and in others it is people who do it. 

In this sense, this deception seeks to generate a large loss for the advertiser, being carried out by competitors.  

Google has already developed tools to avoid charging the advertiser for these clicks, but we should always be very careful to monitor any excessive changes in the number of clicks we receive in our advertising campaigns. 

• Fake domains

Finally, another common practice is the use of fake domains. In this case, advertisers intentionally generate an advertising campaign using domains that originate from other, usually well-known, websites. All of this with the aim of charging higher rates for publishing their advertising campaigns. 

However, this behaviour is a clear copyright infringement and Google is already aware of it, developing a strategy of blocking fake domains and thus preventing bidding on them and preventing advertisers who engage in such behaviour from being able to charge for them. 

Therefore, as we have seen, There are various misleading practices in advertising campaigns, some affecting the advertisers themselves and others the consumers themselves, and we must avoid these practices and, in any case, monitor and control our advertising campaigns to avoid any sabotage by third parties.