Beacon’s Nigel Bridges and Stewart Boutcher made a special visit to the Leeds Businesses Podcast to chat to hosts Rudy Heywood from Famous Wolf Social Media Agency and Steve Twynham from Inspire Radio.
In the podcast Nigel and Stewart talk about the work they’ve been doing with a number of agencies in the fight against the monster bots that steal your marketing budget on Google and Facebook.
You can listen to it here with Nigel and Stewart chatting from the six minute mark onwards:
They also chat about the Digital Marketing Hub, which meets monthly to bring together marketing professionals to share knowledge, ideas and innovation through seminars, presentations and online exchange hubs.
Data and Marketing
Stewart talks about his role with the Data and Marketing Association which is working at the moment on an information programme looking at artificial engagement awareness to help inform best practise and knowledge about a range of subjects relating to bots, ad fraud, click fraud and the lack of data transparency.
The presenters also ask some interesting questions relating to why the big players – Google and Facebook in particular – haven’t done more in the past to cut down on fraudulent activity.
Nigel talks about how there’s very little accountability, leading to a lack of transparency, because there’s no real agency able to monitor or impose regulations on digital platforms, and also how marketers have to hold the platforms to account for the accuracy of their metric analytics.
Stewart gives an insight into his previous role running an agency working in the tech sector where a lot of the issues in the digital marketing world may come from a lack of data knowledge skills, in being aware that some of the work they’ve been doing has been a waste of time because of bots and fraudulent clicks.
Accurate Information
Rudy talks about how agencies can do more to make sure they’re passing on accurate data to their clients when they report back on how the campaigns they’re running for them are doing and how tools like Beacon can help you discover which platforms for digital marketing are working best for their customers.
And they chat further about how using Beacon can also give agencies the information they need to go back to Google or Facebook and say “hey, we wasted X amount of money on running this campaign because Y amount of our clicks were bots and not real people so can we have it back please?”
Bad apples in the digital marketing world also come up for discussion, with a firm emphasis on how companies using agencies should be asking for real metrics which mean something to their business – phone calls, emails and other contact which leads to an actual conversion – over impressions.
Rudy talks about the difference between impressions/followers and actual real engagement, and Stewart and Nigel join in the discussion about buying fake followers and Steve admits he didn’t know a lot about the facts that have been revealed during the chat.