When starting up a business, one of the biggest concerns is visibility. How do you build brand awareness and get people to recognize the value proposition you offer

in the form of products and/or services? This marketing decision can make or break a business. You can invest too much and not get enough of a boost in engagement.

If you do not invest with the right targeting, the ROI can be suspect and lackluster in terms of click-through, user engagement, and hopefully conversion and retention.

One of the first potential advertising decisions is social media. It allows you to give your brand a personal touch. Unless you are promoting a tweet or a post, it is free except time. When creating ads, this is where the situation can get tricky. Social media has the potential to reach billions of people; however how many of them are actually potential buyers? This is a problem with all types of advertising. In the physical world, printing is not immune to fraud. For example, circulations have been in dispute when leftover paper inventory is not probably discounted from the actual delivery total. In the digital age, the differentiating, lingering concern is that the profiles engaging with your ads are not real. There have been numerous stories about bots instead of users. This is understandable. Despite this, online is the new normal. It is just the cost of doing business. Most people in developed economies have mobile devices and are engaged with online commerce, communication, and business.

So are online ad results legit? The answer to this question is yes and no. Online ad results may be skewed by search spiders that parse your web site for information and value. The click through rate for real people is really low at around 1%. This does not take into account the actual number of people who actually saw your ads but chose not to engage with them. The actual number of people would be determined separately while recording the actual number of impressions that were generated of the ad. Is this the same user visiting multiple times or maintaining long sessions where ads refresh? This depends on how deep the analytics are able to detect.

So for a business, the truth of ad authenticity is not as important as the goal of the ad. Getting caught up with the notion of conspiracy is not going to help you get sales. Was the goal to build brand awareness, generate sales, or simply growth traffic that will be monetized with ads?  Depending on which and the ROI after each ad rotation will determine if the ad is successful or if the ad should undergo an alteration or replaced with a new ad campaign. Or perhaps users who may be more inclined to purchase products are not being properly targeted.