Bots — The Digital Manipulator
As a Digital Marketer, my goal is to reach out to the right audience at the right time, to develop relations with genuine customers, to grow my online brand community, to run result-oriented campaigns and lastly to be able to analyze these campaigns effectively.
To achieve this has never been very simple and to add to that misery, we marketers are facing daunting challenges due to the increase growth of bots.
YES, bots have sure made our lives easy. These are the good bots that aid SEO, help in website monitoring, chatbots, personal assistant bots and so on. However, on the flip side, there are the bad bots too that cause a nuisance in the digital world.
What are these bad bots and how are they affecting the lives of marketers?
I have managed some big brands (Starbucks, VIVO, Vero Moda) and have been involved in end to end planning and execution of their digital campaigns. And to my misfortune, there hasn’t been a single segment which was not affected by the unfavorable activities of bots.
Let’s start with likes, comments and shares
Brands spend millions for their social media campaigns to increase their brand awareness, reach and interactions on their pages. But it becomes very difficult to tell whether our social strategy is right or wrong because of social spam bots.
Most of the engagement and comments we get on our page and posts can be traced back to these bots who push fake likes and comments. To give an example, most of the posts for VIVO I boosted on Facebook had comments in different languages, or just ‘nice’, ‘ok’ that too from users that didn’t even match our target set.
It gives a great picture from the outside (when we see 5k likes, 700 comments etc) but as a marketer we know that in real, they are a thorn. We were charged interactions that were fake, unwanted and useless for which we wasted a large chunk of our budgets. It further makes our task difficult to analyze and separate the authentic ones from the fake ones.
Influencer Fraud
I remember Starbucks wanted to launch their first ever store in Kolkta, India and for a part of their social media campaign I was looking at lifestyle and food influencers in Kolkata for collaboration. I scanned through many influencers who had over 200k followers but I was surprised to see their engagement rate on the posts. They merely had 1k–2k likes and around 20–30 comments. After doing an audit of their followers (used social bakers tool) I found out that more than 40% of their followers were fake, they were all bought.(read bots)
As a marketer, it makes it really complicated for us when we want to leverage the audience of these influencers, but may find that the audience isn’t authentic. Again, from the outside it shows that they have a great fan following and partnering with them could get us valuable reach but in reality it is of no use spending money to reach out to bots.
Fake reviews
These days consumers take informed decisions before purchasing anything. An online review of a product has more or less become equivalent to a friends advice.
We see so many fake reviews and feedbacks posted, specially on e-commerce sites like Amazon, Alibaba etc. For marketers, it has become really tough, firstly, to attend and respond to these reviews and secondly to fix the influenced opinions created about their products because of fake reviews.
Bot traffic
Another problem bots create for marketers is bot traffic in the Pay per click and paid social media campaigns. Human like bots are able to copy human mouse movements, page scrolls, clicking on ads, interacting with posts on social media and so on. For Vero Moda, when we ran a paid google search campaign (with proper targeting) we noticed we were getting the desired traffic on the website. However, when we analyzed further, we noticed that though there were visits on the site the audience bounced off with a bounce rate of around 87%. This was very alarming as we were spending money but not getting any conversions. This happened because of traffic manipulated by bots, rendering our analytics meaningless.
In short, the ever increasing growth of bots is an added stress for marketers. They not only have to be careful in not losing marketing budgets on bots but also a lot of their time is wasted making corrections which otherwise could have been utilized for more important tasks.
