Most of my career has been spent marketing for the brand side. I started marketing for B2C companies and then transitioned to focus on B2B. In between, I found myself at an ad-supported media company. At the time, it seemed like my dream job. The company featured a catalog that on the surface, aligned with my background and interests. What would be better than taking a Director of Marketing role marketing the kinds of things I love?

Well, I soon discovered that the content of their catalog was not top-tier, to put it mildly. The one thing you learn very quickly as a start-up marketer, it doesn’t matter how good you are at marketing — you are not a magician. No amount of marketing can save a company that hasn’t found product/market fit. But this company was trying to survive in any manner that they could so that they would be able to license better content. In the meantime, they were trying to sell advertising against their poor content while making some amount of money to sustain themselves.

Enter traffic arbitrage. You may not have heard of the term. The goal of traffic arbitrage is to buy traffic for less than you sell advertising against the traffic. The only way this company could do that was to buy very cheap traffic. Click-bait traffic at the time cost as little as $0.05 — $0.10 a click, and then there is what they call sub-penny traffic. Click-bait traffic is what amounts to sensational headlines leading to sensational articles that may or not be true. You’ve probably seen this kind of content at the bottom of many news sites. This kind of traffic is rarely going to attract quality visitors and these visitors don’t usually come back. Sub-penny traffic is even more recognizable as bot traffic. Being the paid media specialist, I was in charge of traffic arbitrage. Analyzing this traffic, I realized it was not worth spending any time trying to optimize it. I couldn’t turn a bot into a returning audience member, no matter how clever I was.

It was during this time that I became disillusioned with automated bidding platforms. With the promise of cheap traffic for “B Inventory,” my gut knew this ecosystem was most surely full of bots. If you are a large company, you will likely have access to audience measurement tools that help identify legit sites vs. non-legit sites, but it gets trickier to detect bot traffic when you are using an automated bidding platform. Measuring and optimizing the performance of your advertising against a transaction can weed out this illegitimate traffic pretty easily. But when you purchase upper funnel ads or when your product isn’t transactional, it becomes more complicated. If you have a larger budget, there are sophisticated models you can build and/or tools you can purchase to minimize this kind of traffic. But if you have a limited budget, it can be challenging to ensure your ad dollars are spent on real eyeballs.

Automated bid platforms are not the only place where you’ll find this type of suspect traffic. It is also prevalent in influencer and review networks. If you haven’t noticed this recent trend in Facebook advertising, I invite you to take a closer look. If you notice certain ads in your feed these days, you’ll likely see comments from satisfied “customers” giving the brand rave reviews of their product. I’m sure some of these reviews are legit. Brands sometimes will incentivize customers to submit reviews of their products. But on a sponsored ad? This kind of social proof can drive performance. But it can equally start to weaken the industry as a whole when consumers buy from non-legitimate sites and start to catch on to these shady practices. Influencer networks can also be rife with fake “influencers” who have purchased bot followers. If you think you can tell by the engagement metrics, think again. Bots can be easily trained to engage in any number of ways.

I won’t spend too much time on the ethical problems with any of this, because I think we are all fallible in this way — capable of making micro-decisions that can be called into question. But sometimes these practices become such an industry standard that nobody questions them. Sometimes it instead becomes a celebrated “growth hack” trend. I’ve been fortunate to experience both sides of the equation — and I say fortunate because I think it’s important to experience and understand the risks so you can make more informed decisions. If you are not aware of this kind of fraud, it’s easy to be seduced by vanity metrics. Yes, marketers can be seduced by marketing tactics, too. They can also turn a blind eye because they often rely on performance metrics to prove their worth.

So what can you rely on, if you can’t always rely on top-line metrics? There are other signals you can track, but I’ll save that for another post. It starts with awareness and hiring people you trust to look after your business’ bottom line. My priority has always been in favor of the particular business I happen to be marketing. Still, I would much rather spend time on marketing programs that are legitimate and sustainable. There are certain practices in which I simply will no longer participate.

On the other hand, there are some things worth the price you pay for and this includes advertising. It can seem counterintuitive but I’d rather use my limited budget on a smaller but more qualified audience. It’s why I often recommend more expensive and well-researched programs and partnerships over cheaper automated ad buys –especially when you have a limited budget. It’s what I would do if I were investing in my own company.

Marketers, I’d love to hear from you. What is your experience and opinion of these types of programs? Do you feel pressure to participate in them to deliver the kinds of metrics you are asked to deliver?