Day: March 23, 2022

When it comes to paid marketing channels, influencer marketing tops the list. Today, consumers usually like to do some research before making a purchase decision. Although, for most consumers, seeking the opinions of influencers is usually the case. Their opinions or product reviews influence the purchase decision of the consumers.

So, it’s no surprise that brands are leveraging their influence to reach their target audience and increase sales. But what if the follower base of the influencer your brand has partnered with is fake? To be more precise, what if the influencer is fake and all his/her followers were bought?

Brands all over the world have drastically increased their investment in influencer marketing. After all, the revenue generated from influencer marketing is equal to or more, than other paid marketing channels. But partnering with influencers costs, especially if they have an enormous follower base and are sought after in their industry. But if the influence is fake, all that money goes to waste, because the influencer doesn’t have a genuine and engaging follower base.

Since these influencers have no genuine followers, brands get nothing out of the money they invest in them. Although, it’s not just money. Influencer marketing campaigns require extensive planning, preparation and the dedication of your social media teams. All these resources go to waste, which further leads to setbacks in your marketing plans.

In this piece, we are going to discuss some effective ways to identify fake social media influencers. Let’s get right into it.

The Impact of Influencer Fraud

Being a victim of influencer fraud can be disastrous for brands with the biggest impact being the financials. While major, more influential brands may recover, small and emerging businesses might not be so fortunate. Small businesses have limited resources and influencer fraud can just bleed them dry.

Also, the money isn’t the only thing brands lose. The time spent by your social media team could have been put to better use to drive engagement, boost social media presence, and increase conversions. Fake influencers don’t offer genuine engagement, because they have no genuine followers.

Partnering with influencers can also damage your brand reputation. Users do not consider fake influencers credible, and if your target audience finds that out before you do, they will raise questions about your credibility.

How to Spot Fake Influencers?

Now that you know why influencer fraud is a major concern, let’s dive deeper and discuss ways to identify fake influencers.

Analyze Follower Profiles

The easiest way to identify fake followers in an influencer’s follower base is by checking the follower profiles. You can start by looking for follower profiles that do not have a profile image or a bio. Genuine users customize their user profiles with all relevant details, a profile picture, along with a unique bio.

Follower profiles that do not have the relevant details or even the minimum of a profile image are usually fake followers. If these followers comprise most of the influencer’s follower base, they are most probably fake.

Another thing to note is that fake followers also use images of other genuine profiles. In that case, you can simply perform a Google image search using their profile image to verify their credibility.

Check Follower-Engagement Ratio

The follower-engagement ratio is another important statistic that you can use to gauge the credibility of an influencer. Genuine influencers that have spent time and effort usually have an engaged follower base. So, the first thing that you need to check is how much engagement the influencer gets. If the engagement is poor compared to the size of the audience, it is advisable not to partner with them. Even if the influencer hasn’t intentionally bought followers, poor engagement statistics are not great to start a partnership.

Analyze Engagement Quality

Engagement quality is also an effective way to identify fake influencers. While some only buy followers, others go far as even buying engagement, although the bought engagement is usually generic. Just look at the comments on the influencer’s posts. If most of the comments include “nice”, “looks good”, or “great pic”, the audience is most probably fake.

It’s one way to still identify possible issues even if the influencer buys engagement and passes the follower-engagement ratio test.

Check for Sudden Spikes in Follower Growth

Analyzing the follower growth of influencers can also help you identify fake followers. As fake influencers buy fake followers, their follower count will have sudden spikes showing a drastic increase. Using a third-party analytics tool, you can analyze the follower growth of influencers and identify such sudden spikes. It will help you verify if the influencer has bought fake followers or not.

Look for Bot and Inactive Accounts

In the last decade, every social media platform has witnessed a massive increase in automated bot accounts that inflate the follower counts of users that pay for them. These bots follow multiple accounts but don’t have many followers themselves. Therefore, you can use the follower-following ratio to identify automated bot accounts.

We can also conclude a high number of inactive accounts means fake followers for the obvious reason that the user/follower no longer uses the account or the social platform itself. The other reason is that Twitter has been updating its algorithm which has led to multiple bot accounts being abandoned because of the security updates.

Wrapping Up

Influencer fraud is a major concern for brands and marketers, but by analyzing the right metrics, you can identify them with ease. The foremost thing that you need to do after you identify them is to avoid partnering with them. You can also create a blacklist so you don’t have to do it all over again.

Another thing to note is that manually analyzing followers is not always possible. Imagine going through millions of social media accounts. Sounds exhausting, right? In such cases, you can use a third-party tool like FollowerAudit to identify fake followers for you.

Google ads (formerly known as “Adwords”) is an advertising platform offered by Google that allows advertisers to show their products or services on the search engine’s pages. When someone clicks on one of these ads, they’ll be directed to the advertiser’s website. It might seem like it would be easy to set up and manage a campaign for your business with this kind of advertising – but there is more than meets the eye!

If you’re looking for some tips on how you can increase your return from running Google Ads campaigns, read on!

1. Use a Budget That Is Appropriate For Your Industry and Product

When it comes to budgeting for your Google Ads campaign, it’s important to be realistic about how much you’re willing to spend. You’ll want to consider your overall marketing budget, and also think about how much you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad.

Be careful when you are setting your average daily budget. Bear in mind that the price your setting is averaged over the course of the month so you may even spend double it over some days but your entire monthly spend will not be more than your daily budget multiplied by 30 days.

If you’re not sure how much to spend, try starting with a small amount and increasing it gradually as you see results.

Having said that, make sure your billing is in line with your competitors, if they are spending $3 per click and you are spending 25 cents for the same visitors, do not expect to get many clicks.

2. Try Some Remarketing Tactics to Reach Those Who Have Already Visited Your Site

Google Ads remarketing is a feature of the AdWords platform that allows businesses to show ads to people who have visited their website before. This can be a great way to reconnect with potential customers who may have been interested in your products or services but didn’t make a purchase.

To start using remarketing, you’ll need to create a remarketing list. This is simply a list of all the people who have visited your website. These are created by adding a tracking code to your website. You can then create an ad campaign that will show ads to these people on Google and across the web.

When creating your ad campaign, you’ll need to choose a goal for it. Some common goals for remarketing campaigns include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, and getting more leads or sales.

Once you’ve chosen a goal, you’ll need to create ads that are relevant to your target audience. You’ll also need to come up with a budget and schedule for your campaign.

Remarketing can be a great way to increase the return on investment from your Google Ads campaigns. If you’re not currently using this feature, give it a try and see how it can help your business grow.

3. Consider Using Negative Keywords to Avoid Targeting Irrelevant Searches or Competition’s Products and Services

One of the best ways to make sure that your Google Ads campaigns are effective is to use negative keywords.

What are negative keywords?

Negative keywords are words or phrases that you add to your campaign to prevent your ads from being shown when someone is searching for those terms.

For example, if you’re selling Mercedes cars, you might want to add the keyword “photo” as a negative keyword. This would mean that your ads wouldn’t show up when someone searches for photos of Mercedes cars.

Adding negative keywords can help you save money on your advertising budget, because you’ll be preventing your ads from being shown to people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. It can also help you improve the quality of your website’s traffic, as people who are searching for negative keywords aren’t likely to be looking for a business like yours.

4. Conduct A/B testing on Both Copy and Landing Pages

Test out different variations of an ad or offer to see which one provides the best results! This will help you maximize your return from running AdWords campaigns by giving you more information on what works best for you and what doesn’t

Add a compelling call-to-action that will encourage people to click through and learn more about what you’re advertising!

5. Get Professional Help With Your Google Ads

When it comes to something as important as advertising your business, it’s always a good idea to get professional help. This is especially true when it comes to Google Ads – a platform that can be tricky to navigate at first. A good AdWords consultant will be able to help you create campaigns that are effective and profitable, and they’ll also be able to give you advice on how you can improve your results over time. If you’re serious about running successful Google Ads campaigns, then it’s definitely worth considering hiring a professional consultant.

Google Ads is a powerful advertising platform that can help you drive more traffic to your website and generate sales. However, it’s not always easy for small business owners to navigate Google Ads campaigns on their own. If this sounds like you, consider hiring a Google ads consultant or agency who will be able to provide guidance and expertise in areas such as creating copy that maximizes clicks-through rates and landing pages that convert visitors into customers.

Do some of these tips sound familiar? Which ones have been most helpful when trying out new digital marketing strategies with your ads? Let us know!