Behind the scene of Digital/Internet Advertising

Whenever we look for any website we find the websites full of advertisements. Internet advertising is playing an important role in today’s world of advertising. Internet advertising is the immediate publishing of information and content that is not limited by geography or time.

Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. The Internet advertising  has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs for the distribution of information and media to a global audience.

But the question is if you are paying ‘x’ amount for advertising on web – Is it worth? Are you getting the advertising actually or its just a fraud? And the answer, in most of the cases, is you are not getting the benefit according to the money you paid for the digital advertising.

Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. But there is lots of advertising fraud in the world of digital advertising. There is enough reason to believe that digital advertisers are getting overcharged. Many advertisers have no idea that these scams are possible and they are certainly not aware that they are affected. 

Many times the advertiser pays each time the ad is seen (pay per impression). But what if the ad was shown in an invisible window, where the ad is not seen by the viewer? The site might actually show three visible ads but charge for showing 103 ads. Think about a scenario where an advertiser pays per impression, and the site actually shows a million impressions. This is the common example of real advertising scam.

Sometime when you search for a particular trademark for online shopping, let’s take the example of Dell’s laptop, you select a particular model of Dell’s laptop for shopping. As soon as you are about to click ‘add to basket’ the spyware in your computer covers up the Dell Website completely with a list of ads.  They load software like spyware on a user’s computer and track what the user is viewing without his/her knowledge.

If user search for a certain trademark on web and also receive ads of the competitor trademark it’s highly opportunistic.  In most of the countries like Europe, U.K. etc it’s illegal. When consumers type a particular brand there is a reasonable expectation that every link on that page is going to be responsive to what they asked. And what happened? Competition sucks away the consumer.