3 ms·

friend of mine - which had huge success with influencer marketing on instagram in the german speaking market / organic cosmetics niche - tiptoed into the italia

by franze 9y ago

friend of mine - which had huge success with influencer marketing on instagram in the german speaking market / organic cosmetics niche - tiptoed into the italian market. from what we could see the account looked legit. the pics were good, lots of comments, good interaction from other accounts with lots of followers, some other brands also - seemingly - using the account to promote products. invested a few hundred euros, great response on the postings, zero impact on sales and onlineshop traffic (which was not the same behaviour we saw in the german market). we investigate further. the responses on every post were always pretty similar, coming out of a pool of about 200 different responses, sometimes with emoji variations. even bad posts, very shitty pics with clear commercial intent, got the "awesome" and "#heart #heart"treatment. after three degrees of separation (the accounts which liked the accounts which liked the accounts) the accounts became slightly spammy. all in all, very sophisticated work. we changed the approach, we completely ignore accounts which contact us. if we identify an account with a 10k+ followers, a long post history and some meaningful interaction (even snark in the comments), we contact them. but yeah, identifying - really really well made - fakes on instragram (especially non english/german accounts because of the language barrier) would be a SAAS we were willing to use.

PMan74 9y ago
This is why I don't especially worry about fake influences, bogus ad clicks, etc. Any advertiser worth their salt should be able to see the results (or lack of results) very quickly. Sure there'll be dumb brands throwing money away on fake clicks/likes/re-tweets/etc and not measuring results. And while that is regrettable & wouldn't happen in an ideal world it's their money to waste foolishly.
- TorKlingberg 9y ago
  It's one thing when entering a new market. You expect your sales in Italy to go some zero to something, and if it doesn't you know your ads aren't working. It's harder to tell the difference if you already have large sales, unless you can connect an individual sale to the ad that drove it.
- shalmanese 9y ago
  Attribution is tricky at the best of times and worse when you're dealing with many, small campaigns rather than a few discrete large campaigns. Let's say you make surfboards that are primarily bought offline at surf shops. You run a campaign with 100 instagram influencers in the San Diego area and you see a 15% greater uplift in sales compared to nationwide. Which influencers contributed meaningfully and which ones were fake accounts where you wasted your money? How much of that 15% uplift is because of the influencer campaign vs a longer summer in San Diego this year vs some totally organic consumer spreading it via WOM? Even if you want to design an experiment, summer's already over and you'll need to wait until next summer to test out your hypothesis. It's not hard to see how a scammer could cobble together a dozen or so of these different advertisers and make a substantial sum out of fraud consistently without ever getting caught.

by franze 9y ago

PMan74 9y ago

This is why I don't especially worry about fake influences, bogus ad clicks, etc. Any advertiser worth their salt should be able to see the results (or lack of results) very quickly. Sure there'll be dumb brands throwing money away on fake clicks/likes/re-tweets/etc and not measuring results. And while that is regrettable & wouldn't happen in an ideal world it's their money to waste foolishly.

TorKlingberg 9y ago
It's one thing when entering a new market. You expect your sales in Italy to go some zero to something, and if it doesn't you know your ads aren't working. It's harder to tell the difference if you already have large sales, unless you can connect an individual sale to the ad that drove it.
shalmanese 9y ago
Attribution is tricky at the best of times and worse when you're dealing with many, small campaigns rather than a few discrete large campaigns. Let's say you make surfboards that are primarily bought offline at surf shops. You run a campaign with 100 instagram influencers in the San Diego area and you see a 15% greater uplift in sales compared to nationwide. Which influencers contributed meaningfully and which ones were fake accounts where you wasted your money? How much of that 15% uplift is because of the influencer campaign vs a longer summer in San Diego this year vs some totally organic consumer spreading it via WOM? Even if you want to design an experiment, summer's already over and you'll need to wait until next summer to test out your hypothesis. It's not hard to see how a scammer could cobble together a dozen or so of these different advertisers and make a substantial sum out of fraud consistently without ever getting caught.