Eg. we audited a few Youtube Ads campaings for a client another agency did. They raved on the performance.. we couldn't identify a single sale or even a contact form, nothing, nada.. and they spent beyond $25K..
So, the $7500 spend I mentioned was the huge "success" of a $30,000 ad buy. The rest performed worse, but the $7500 ad was the one they touted as having a 36:1 ROAS, even though it had about $3000 in directly attributable sales. The other $22,500 did worse. If there was a legitimate conversion, it was one or two at most. But the ad agency were raving over the amazing performance of the campaign.
This was the third agency in a row to do this and this third agency had been told that crap like this was among the reasons that the first two agencies weren't working with us anymore.... didn't seem to sink in.
I feel like they prey on people who do not know how to read the numbers or do not have independent ways to verify sales or something. Or busy people who think they can trust their ad agency.
It's like the people I see who are so excited because their PR firm got their PR piece on a blog with 100,000 visitors per month. A quick look and you find
- the number doesn't match up with SimilarWeb at all (which for a decently trafficked site is not going to be off by 10X in my experience)
- a site: search says the site has 10,000 URLs indexed in Google (so, roughly 10 visitors per page, but probably 50% of those to the top 10-20 pages).
- none of the ten most recent posts has a single comment or social share except by the publisher.
- the publishers social feed is nothing but automated posts linking to latest articles and has no interaction at all.
So basically, they got your piece on a crappy content farm. But it's a "PR win."
If it's a link and it's editorial and the page gets any readers at all, I think that *is* a win. Happy to have it. I won't look down my nose.
But I often see the report from the PR firm designed to imply that the article got 100,000 views, when it's the site as a whole that got 100,000 views (assuming they are actually telling the truth, which often SimilarWeb would suggest they aren't). Ultimately, though, it's not in the interest of the PR firm to push too hard on the stats that the publisher provides. Ideally, they should be inflated, but reasonable.
<rant class="unnecessary abbreviated">Influencers</rant>