Click-bait advertising can damage your business as an advertiser
                     Click-bait advertising can damage your business as an 
advertiser
John Z
Writes on ad managing using ad servers for publishers, 
involved with Ad server for publishers from Adspeed.
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.
About Adspeed
AdSpeed ad server is a reliable & powerful ad serving and ad 
management solution that serves your ads, tracks impressions & clicks 
and reports ad statistics in real-time. Driven by the latest ad serving 
technologies, the goal of Adspeed adserver is to provide a reliable 
platform that can help in executing online advertising strategy more 
efficiently. 
Thank you for spending your precious time in reading this article.