What is ‘Clicksploitation’?
What is it?
Clicksploitation is a legal practice where publishers use misleading or deliberately vague targeting to create the illusion that many potential customers are visiting the brand’s landing pages, but in reality, almost none of the clicks will result in a purchase.
Clicksploitation is related to ‘Click Fraud’ - a type of fraud that artificially inflates clicks in paid ad campaigns using bots. Click Fraud involves deliberately misleading clients and is illegal, whilst Clicksploitation involves exploiting the system (bending the rules) to extract more of a client’s budget that they would if they knew the truth.
It is common for advertisers to ‘pay per click’, and so both Click Fraud and Clicksploitation, in artificially boosting clicks, gives more revenue to publishers without providing any value to advertisers.
Is it happening to me?
B2B brands are particularly vulnerable to Clicksploitation because most ad platforms and publishers are designed for B2C marketers and provide such poor audience targeting and reporting capabilities for B2B brands anyway. B2B brands are often forced to target by inappropriate or vague features, such as ‘Industry’, ‘Revenue’, ‘Years of experience’ or even consumer ‘interest categories’ designed for B2C targeting. This means it can be hard or impossible to detect whether people being targeted, let alone clicking, are in the right job titles at good-fit companies.
Terms such as ‘audience expansion’ and ‘audience network’, are used by mainstream ad platforms as a cover to serve ads and get clicks from accounts that do not represent the stated intended audience.
Prevalence in B2B
B2B Clicksploitation is endemic due to a combination of:
Genuinely poor targeting and reporting capabilities in traditional ad platforms, including due to increased regulation in certain markets such as the DMA
The small and static audience sizes of the leading traditional B2B social networks
A strong incentive for publishers and ad platforms to fully spend the budgets made available to them by brands, regardless of reducing client ROI
Rapidly growing B2B Ad budgets without tools to detect abuse
Mis-aligned incentives baked-into the system
Because all mainstream ad platforms were initially designed for B2C advertising, they have B2C assumptions baked into them. For example: measuring performance by the number of clicks or click-through-rate makes sense in B2C, where every single person clicking is potentially a customer, but this is just not the case in B2B. A business might have 50K employees, but they can only buy once (or perhaps a handful of times). As a new B2B marketing Adzact-user put it to me the other day:
“That really makes it clear just how not geared towards B2B advertising platforms are, because we don't care about contacting 1200 people. We care about contacting one decision maker at 1200 companies.”
Mainstream Ad Platforms are heavily incentivised to boost the number of clicks their clients receive from campaigns, but have very little incentive to increase the quality of these clicks, i.e. the conversion rate from lead to sale. Mainstream ad platforms are paid per click, even by B2B clients. So they are unlikely to change in the near future. Most B2B Marketers are currently unaware that dedicated B2B Ad platforms that solve this problem, such as Adzact, exist, though this is changing.
The scale of the problem
Most B2B Marketers have noticed alarming declines in B2B Ad ROI over the last three years as B2B Digital Ad Budgets have been growing.
The market leading B2B Ad platform LinkedIn has seen B2B ad revenue rise from $1.6Bn to $4.6Bn since 2020, and their ad revenue continue to grow at 24% a year. But LinkedIn CPC is going up 30% a year, even faster than revenue, implying they're delivering less and less value to their clients over time.
Adzact’s Analysis of a year's worth of LinkedIn Advertising at 46 different B2B brands shows 33% of their combined budget ($21M of $65M total) was spent on just 100 common ‘Click-Sponge’ entities.
Regardless of intended targeting, LinkedIn spent their ad revenues on ‘click-sponges’ to pad out perceived value and use-up available budgets.
These 100 entities are almost universally a terrible fit for the B2B brands. They pollute sales pipelines and waste sales time.
To be clear: if this is happening to you, you won’t necesarilly know it. LinkedIn and other mainstream ad platforms make it almost impossible to see the full scale of the problem through their standard reporting user-interface, where you can only see a sample of the companies targeted for each campaign. You can see the problem by interacting with their API, but for that you’d need an approved app in their marketplace.
Crisis:
This problem is becoming a crisis. B2B Marketing leaders are being asked to drive more revenue from digital channels as traditional B2B telemarketing and email marketing channels become harder and more expensive due to cultural changes, working from home and regulation on direct marketing.
This is leading to rapidly growing B2B Ad budgets. B2B Digital Ad spend in the US was $6Bn in 2019, but $14Bn in 2022 and it is expected to grow to $23Bn this year. There are very few other industries growing at this rate (source: US Digital Marketing Spend 2002-2023: eMarketer 2023).
At the same time, traditional B2B publishers and ad platforms are not seeing increases in the sizes of their audiences to go along with these increased budgets, or creating precise audience targeting methods similar to Facebook or Google’s during the rise of B2C Digital Ad Spend that would allow many clients accurately segment a single pool of visitors, so they only advertise to the right ones.
The lack of good quality tools to detect and prevent B2B Clicksploitation means that competitors or publishers may increasingly abuse your click volumes, wasting your spend without any chance these clicks will become a customer.
Stop Clicksploitation
Adzact can stop Clicksploitation instantly and free your ad budgets. Click here to try for free.
