Liam Walsh writes
There are a few swindles going about. The biggest being that search engines actually generate sales rather than direct them.
But my views on search being ‘countable’ versus ‘accountable’ are well documented. I am free for 21st birthdays, weddings, parties to discuss this. It is obviously a broadly fascinating area.
No this piece of venom is for our home grown bandits that run advertising to foreign IPs. I won’t name them as the advertisers and their agencies should be checking this stuff and aren’t.
As I recently posted recently I have the privilege of having travelled overseas a bit this year and each time I did, I saw the same major Australian sites running our Australian advertisers in other countries.
While I appreciate this happens on borders of our states with newspapers, radio stations etc, the magnitude is mild.
With our local larger websites, upwards of 20% of their traffic is foreign and it is being sold without mentioning that 20% is wasted.
This is not a grown up way to business.
4 responses so far ↓
Ruud Spierings // December 15, 2008 at 10:32 am
Agree Liam, but most important line from your bit would be “the advertisers and their agencies should be checking this stuff and aren’t.”
If they cared enough to check, this practice would be history within the next 6 months.
Is there any such thing as “grown up business”?
Aren’t clients and agencies trying to squeeze every last bit they can out of publishers as it is as well, so it’s more of a two way street?
Jamie // December 15, 2008 at 11:30 am
In my opinion, any agency worth its salt should ask for AU IP targeting on their campaigns. It’s always surprised me how few actually do.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the publisher’s responsibility to assume when a ROS campaign is booked that the advertiser doesn’t want the potential to reach all of the sites’ users, some of whom may be Aussie ex-pats or traveling Australians.
‘Bandit’ web sites swindling Aussie advertisers « mUmBRELLA // December 16, 2008 at 5:08 pm
[...] a comment » Australian online advertisers are being “swindled” by sites serving 20% of their ads to foreign audiences, claims the boss of [...]
James Drewe // December 17, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’ve run a couple of final campaign reports in the past and been stunned to see 10% of our traffic coming from overseas sources. What’s more worrying was the fact that these ads were supposed to be geotargeted to QLD.