At my current company, we do a lot of things to try to bring leads into the top of the funnel. We spend a lot of time on the inbound side, creating content that goes after search traffic. We do a few whitepaper campaigns with vendors, all with specific criteria (companies with over 500 employees, etc). Like just about any other company out there, we also run AdWords and facebook ads.
And then there’s banner ads. One of these things is not like the others.
I’ve never been a big fan of banner ads for a number of reasons, most dealing with trust.
When you do a banner campaign, you have to blindly trust that the vendor is actually showing your ads. Where you’re paying for clicks on an AdWords campaign, banner campaigns are based on impressions: the number of times the ads are shown.
And who is to say that your ads are being shown?
The inspiration for this post is an email I received this morning from a vendor that is making my blood boil. Though I’d like nothing more than to write the name of the company, I’ve decided to wait it out. Here’s what happened.
The Campaign Begins
We wanted to do a trial campaign with a nationally-known company with several web sites that hit our target market effectively: C-Level IT Execs in large companies using Google Apps.
We decided on a campaign that was half whitepaper leads, half banner ads. It took us a bit to get our ads together, and in the meantime we started running the whitepaper program.
Not surprisingly, the leads from our whitepaper program were highly qualified. I’d say that 70% of the leads we received were legit (when you subtract people using fake email addresses, fake company names, etc.). That’s not bad. And each time I’d send back a garbage lead, the company would give us another credit to replace the bad lead. So far so good.
When we sent over our banner ads and started the campaign, I immediately started seeing an uptick in registrations for a trial of our app. As we always do, we created a unique landing page for the ad campaign. This way, the only way someone can arrive at that landing page is by clicking the ad (we don’t link the page anywhere else on the site). Additionally, the form is unique to the campaign.
The only problem is that every signup we saw on that landing page was garbage. Literally 100% of signups were junk. That was a red flag. If the only people that came to this page were doing so after clicking a banner ad, then what percentage of our banner impressions were being showed to spam bots? 100%?
After a few days of running the banner ads, I asked the vendor to both pause our ads and give us metrics on our campaign performance. I also sent them the list of leads that had signed up on our site from the ad campaign (showing the garbage we received).
After a couple of weeks, the answer I got: “Nothing is wrong. Your ads were shown on our site, and we recommend that you add a captcha to your form. We use a 3rd party ad server, and they have confirmed that your ads were shown correctly.”
Rather than giving information on why 100% of the traffic coming to our site from the ad was spam, they instead give us tips on how to stop their spam traffic from signing up on our site? It’s the equivalent of saying “We’re going to show your ad to a bunch of spam bots. If you don’t want them to sign up, here’s how you can make it more difficult to fill out your form. We’re still going to waste your impressions on spam bots rather than people, but here’s how you can remedy that pesky junk signup problem.”
The Resolution
After a call on Friday where we asked for a full credit for what we paid on questionable impressions to be applied to new whitepaper leads, I received an email this morning. My sales rep told me that his boss agreed to a half credit, as our ads were served properly, and were seen by the right audience.
Again, my knee-jerk reaction is to bash the company, but that’s not for me. Instead, I want to shine a light on the bigger picture: the fact that there’s no accountability and no proof when it comes to banner ads. It’s all about trust, and there’s no transparency whatsoever.
Anyone can throw together a spreadsheet that shows xx,xxx impressions and xxx clicks, but how can you rely on those numbers?
There’s not much that I can do at this point other than accepting the offer and never doing business with the company again. While it would have been ridiculously easy for the company to give us a credit, knowing that we would continue working with them moving forward, they’ve decided to go the other way. It’s a good lesson to learn early.
