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Click-bait advertising can damage your business as an advertiser

If you have spent any time on the internet, you will almost certainly have seen an ad or a clickable headline that grabbed your attention. After clicking on the link, you are taken to a page that has very little to do with the headline you read, or which forces you to flip through countless ad-filled pages to hopefully get to the part of the story that you actually wanted to read. Many people quit after a few pages, but the publisher has already raked in ad revenue before you moved on. This form of ad serving is often referred to as clickbait. While it is heavily frowned upon by the online community, there are still plenty of businesses, marketers, advertisers, and publishers who choose to go that route. There are several reasons why clickbait is a bad idea for your business, so let’s look at a few.

Grab negative attention

One of the main reasons for the popularity of clickbait advertising is because it is an easy way to grab attention and get a lot of eyes on your content quickly. The problem for advertisers is that there is a real risk of upsetting a large percentage of the people who click on the ad, only to find out that they have been duped. While the numbers you can pull in are certainly high, the bad taste that you leave in the mouths of potential customers is not good.

Create ethical issues

When you are trying to grow your business, one of the best ways to go about it is to build a solid relationship with your customers. Once you are able to develop a high level of trust, you also build loyalty and the potential for positive word of mouth. Clickbait advertising delivers the exact opposite effect, as trust almost immediately goes out the window. Potential customers will feel as though they have been treated unethically and experienced false advertising. You can bet that they will share their frustration and anger with their social networks.

Increase bounce rate

As we mentioned earlier, clickbait ads will garner a lot of attention and get people to your website, but how many of them will actually stick around? The answer is not many, and even if people do decide to stay and have a look, how many of them actually fall into your target audience. Getting attention of the wrong crowd wastes advertising budget and could even damage your business. There really is very little sustainable reward from running these types of ads.

Mess up metrics

When running any sort of ad campaign, you rely on data and metrics to see which ads are working and which ones need a little tweaking. You just don’t get a clear picture of the traffic metrics and analytics when running clickbait ads because the high bounce rate and low-quality traffic make it close to impossible to make a good judgement.

Risk your reputation

If you are in the market for poor reviews and potential SEO penalties, then clickbait advertising is the way to go. It is entirely possible to risk the reputation and life of your business by running a clickbait ad just once, never mind several times. Angry and confused viewers will leave bad reviews on social networks, reviewing sites and forums. These negative mentions and links will ruin your search-engine optimization efforts. In conclusion, we believe it is a good idea to avoid clickbait advertising due to its many problems.

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