SafeUM
Home Blog Services Download Help About Recharge

Axarhöfði 14, 110 Reykjavik, Iceland

Iceland - 2015
SafeUM
Blog
Services
Download
Help
About
Recharge
Menu
Archive
TOP Security!
9 Sep 2016

How Internet ads work

For centuries, advertising was fundamentally unidirectional. A company blasted out advertising and the public — actually, not a very predictable portion of the public — received it.

That’s still the case with traditional media —radio, TV, magazines, billboards, and so forth. The advertiser has an approximate idea of how many people might see or hear the advertisement, but detailed information is out of reach — how many people actually viewed it?

How many of them were interested in the advertised product or service? How old are they? Where are they from? Not to mention a hundred other questions that could help the company convert viewers into customers. With digital media, advertisers gain powerful tools to learn more about the people who are exposed to their ads. Or, looking at it from the consumer side, digital media gives advertisers powerful ways to spy on you and effectively sell you stuff you never wanted to buy until they reached you.

Essentially, with ad tools and digital media, advertising becomes bidirectional. The result is more effective and targeted marketing investments. A good web marketing campaign requires specialists who know how to develop, publish, and monitor it, and it almost always yields the expected returns.

That’s why worldwide ad spending is going to reach $674 billion by the end of 2020 by eMarketer estimates. Here we take a quick journey through digital marketing and how it affects us all. We’ll look at what digital marketing is and how it has evolved. We’ll also reveal some tactics ad agencies use to make inroads to the toughest customers.

The players

It may seem as though everyone has something to sell you. Publisher, advertiser, affiliate…everyone finds you fascinating! When I hear about marketing and read articles, I often see a lot of confusion about the entities involved in digital marketing. Let’s cut through the confusion with a few brief but clear definitions.

The advertiser (or merchant) kicks things off. This company wants to create an advertising campaign to promote its brand, product, or service. The advertiser pays for the promotion. Then there may be an advertising agency to act as an intermediary. In many cases, the advertiser doesn’t have the knowledge and experience to create and lead an effective marketing campaign. Creativity and know-how are key, and ad agencies provide those. An ad agency can manage a marketing campaign from planning to publishing and beyond.

The last piece of the puzzle is the publisher (or affiliate), an individual or organization that places advertising on digital platforms. Increasingly, big publishers provide full service in advertising, taking on the role of the ad agency as well. You may have heard the term affiliate networks as well. Affiliate networks are virtual spaces where advertisers find publishers and vice versa. Advertisers sign up, load their campaigns, and chose which affiliate program is most suitable. Publishers, in turn, join a network and offer their inventory in exchange for revenue.

The money

A variety of payment models exist. With pay-per-impression (or cost-per-impression, CPM), the advertiser pays a fee each time an ad is displayed, regardless of whether the user clicks on it. Another model, pay-per-click (or PPC or CPC) has the advertiser paying the publisher each time the ad is clicked. Finally, pay-per-action is a performance-based model. The advertiser pays each time an agreed action is performed by the user — signing up, say, or registering for a newsletter, buying a product, completing a survey, and so forth.

Where there is money, there are criminals

Given the simplicity of the payment models above, it might seem easy to cheat the system and generate fake traffic. That is partly true, although anti-fraud systems mitigate the problem. One of the simplest methods for generating clicks is paid-to-click, which actually is not a scam: Real people really are rewarded for clicking on ads. This “easy money” scheme is fairly well known. People get drawn in by promises of getting big money for doing almost nothing — just clicking links a few hours a day. In reality, you would have to click all day, quickly and without breaks, to make even a few bucks.

Another method involves automated scripts, such as ClickJacking. By using this technique, criminals can trick users and “hijack” clicks on some objects, routing them to another page. Then there is malware that can make botnets capable of generating traffic on infected computers for pay-per-click campaigns. Trojan-Clicker is the most prevalent click-fraud malware. This code remains in system memory and attempts to connect to specific Internet resources, such as online ads. That damages not only the digital marketing system, but also the users who unknowingly take part in the fraud. The above is just a small taste of the basic concepts of digital advertising.

Tags:
data protection fraud
Source:
Kaspersky Daily
1775
Other NEWS
3 Jul 2020 safeum news imgage An encrypted messaging service has been infiltrated by police
4 May 2020 safeum news imgage Two-Factor Authentication ​What Is It and Why You Should Use It
12 Dec 2019 safeum news imgage Encryption is under threat - this is how it affects you
4 Nov 2019 safeum news imgage Should Big Decisions Be Based on Data or Your Intuition?
7 Jun 2018 safeum news imgage VPNFilter malware infecting 500,000 devices is worse than we thought
4 Jun 2018 safeum news imgage Hackers target Booking.com in criminal bid to steal hundreds of thousands from customers
1 Jun 2018 safeum news imgage Operator of World's Top Internet Hub Sues German Spy Agency
30 May 2018 safeum news imgage US says North Korea behind malware attacks
29 May 2018 safeum news imgage Facebook and Google targeted as first GDPR complaints filed
25 May 2018 safeum news imgage A new reason to not buy these cheap Android devices
24 May 2018 safeum news imgage Flaws in smart pet devices, apps could come back to bite owners
23 May 2018 safeum news imgage Google sued for 'clandestine tracking' of 4.4m UK iPhone users' browsing data
21 May 2018 safeum news imgage LocationSmart reportedly leaked phone location data onto the web
18 May 2018 safeum news imgage The SEC created its own scammy ICO to teach investors a lesson
17 May 2018 safeum news imgage Thieves suck millions out of Mexican banks in transfer heist
All news
SafeUM
Confidential Terms of Use Our technologies Company
Follow us
Download
SafeUM © Safe Universal Messenger

Axarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland

Iceland - 2015