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Automotive Marketing

Growing Concerns Over Bot Traffic in Digital Marketing

April 8, 2025 by AIM

Growing Concerns Over Bot Traffic in Digital Marketing

Advertisers Question the Accuracy of Human Verification Systems such as HUMAN Security, Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify.

Published: April 8, 2025


Automotive Internet Media | Digital Marketing Agency

Human Verification Systems

The digital advertising industry faces an escalating challenge with bot traffic, as trusted verification systems—like Human Security, Integral Ad Science (IAS), and DoubleVerify—are not effectively blocking non-human traffic as promised. These platforms, which advertisers pay for pre-bid bot filtration, are failing to prevent ads from being served to malicious bots that may be slipping through the cracks. 

According to AdExchanger, “Adalytics also observed multiple major DSPs and SSPs serving ads to bots, despite claiming to use bot detection tech, including HUMAN Security, to scan 100% of impressions. The scale of potential waste reflected in the report is staggering. Adalytics analyzed source code for millions of ad impressions served to bots between 2019 and 2025.” This highlights the significant volume of ad impressions wasted on bots instead of reaching real human audiences.

Even with advanced bot detection tools like HUMAN Security, verification systems are failing to deliver, causing advertisers to question the effectiveness of MRC and TAG-accredited services. There’s growing frustration over the lack of accountability in the supply chain, especially when advertisers are investing a lot of money into “bot-free” segments, only to find that their campaigns are being contaminated with non-human traffic.

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Filed Under: Industry News, Marketing Tagged With: Automotive Marketing, Digital Marketing

Strategic Marketing Choices

March 17, 2020 by Tony French

Strategic Marketing Choices

Do you know that every dollar spent on advertising does not generate the same results? With so much uncertainty in the world today, dealerships need to make the best choices possible when managing their marketing budget. Making changes to your marketing plan can be a daunting thought but considering the amount of ambiguity over the next couple months, it’s important not to discard marketing that works while retaining the redundant marketing overlap.

Data Driven Decisions

Dealers have always had to build their dealership brand, advertise inventory and sales promotions and build customer loyalty. In today’s turbulent environment, dealers must play a critical new role, they must be strategists, allocating their budget to marketing resources that produce the strongest results.

Rather than “going with your gut,” the better operators are embracing performance data when making budgetary decisions to improve efficiency and create opportunities.

Dealers are used to making savvy business decisions. They understand dealership performance data at a gut level, because that’s what they do every day. They may not know exactly how Google Analytics works and may have never looked at that data, but almost all dealerships have it setup on their website. By putting in the work required to access and understand website metrics, every dealership can make better marketing decisions. There is mounting evidence pointing to a simple fact: data-driven dealerships perform better.

The first step is to acknowledge the effectiveness of using data driven decisions in making marketing decisions. Making decisions using data is not new concept. Dealers have been using their financial statement to make decisions for years but leveraging marking data from tools like Google Analytics when making strategic marketing decisions and allocating marketing budgets is new for most dealers.

Here are just a few of the many questions about your various marketing campaigns that you can answer using tools like Google Analytics:

  • How many visitors did the campaign send to my website?
  • How many vehicles did those visitors look at? Were they visitors or auto shoppers?
  • How engaged where those visitors?
  • Did an increase a budget with a vendor produce better results?
  • What was the conversion rate for that campaign? Was it better than other campaigns?

 

There are many other additional questions that tools like Google Analytics can answer, but these are a few to help you consider the benefits of data driven decision making. Also, dealers don’t need to become experts in Google Analytics, but need to know enough to help them make the best marketing decisions possible.

Law of Diminishing “Third Party Listing Sites” Return

Leveraging third party listing sites like Autotrader.com, Cars.com, CarGurus.com, etc. will get your inventory in front of more auto shoppers. Each of these sites spend millions in paid advertising to bring visitors to their website. Many of those millions are spent buying dealership make and model keywords in the search engines, making your online advertising costs much higher.

Many dealerships leverage several of these listing sites, while ignoring the digital fundamentals of building their own online presence. They believe the more they spend in these sites, the better results they will receive. It may be true that allocating more budget to these sites will produce better visibility, but will the dealerships sell more vehicles?

We need to remember how most shoppers use these sites and how these sites work. They all vary to a certain degree, but for the most part, they are all operate with a similar model. A consumer either searches by style or by a specific make and model (miles, price, equipment, etc.). Then vehicle results are displayed by zip code. Do dealerships need to pay for extra programs like “Dealer Showcase” or “Elite” to get their inventory found by the website shoppers? Is the “upsell” juice worth the squeeze?

At some point, the dealership will find that getting the right visibility will yield the maximum number of leads from each site. If the dealership pays for more visibility, the budget will be less efficient because the proportional increase in cost will not produce more leads or vehicle sales.

This same principal works for third-party sites collectively as well. Do dealerships need to pay to have their inventory listed in Autotrader.com, Cars.com and CarGurus.com? Are these sites hitting the same consumers and not really increasing a dealership overall reach? Since most dealerships don’t have an unlimited adverting budget, it’s always a good idea to measure each channel to ensure that you are getting optimal results for your advertising budget. If you keep pumping more money into multiple third-party sites and you are not reaching different in-market shoppers, at some point your conversion rate will go down and cost per acquisition will go up. It’s probably already too high. As a result, many dealerships have elected to eliminate major third-party listing sites if they are not reaching new and different in-market shoppers.

Summary

Making strategic marketing decisions based on the right data are the specific steps dealerships need to take to deploy the right marketing campaigns. Understanding your highest returning marketing channels helps dealerships make the hard decisions on what to keep and what to let go.

As dealerships look to cut costs and improve operations, many dealership operators are turning to inventory marketing products to increase efficiencies and sell more vehicles. CarClicks Inventory Marketing products leverage multiple marketing platforms to promote the dealership’s inventory and brand. The CarClicks platform allows dealerships to build their online brand and spend less while increasing the visibility of a dealership’s inventory to in-market auto shoppers. All results are 100% trackable in Google Analytics or other analytic platforms and produce high ROI results.

Filed Under: AIM Team, Marketing, Tips Tagged With: Automotive, Automotive Internet Media, Automotive Marketing, Digital Marketing

Dealers Will Shift 60% of Advertising Dollars to Digital in the Next Two Years

July 29, 2019 by AIM

Digital advertising in the automotive industry has increased tremendously over the last decade. Analysts are predicting that the growth will continue for the next two years stating that digital will be 60% of a dealer’s ad spend by 2021 (Maryann Keller & Associates, MK& A Franchise Dealer Advertising Study).

Why the Continued Increase?

A Mobile World
A huge driver causing this increase has been consumers higher usage of mobile devices. Dealership Websites continue to see the percentage of their mobile traffic on the rise. In turn they are allocating more ad dollars to match and dedicating more time to optimize their websites for better conversion on mobile. Mobile traffic will account for 65.1% of auto ad spend in 2019 and 68.1% in 2020 (eMarketer, Mobile Ad Spending by Industry, 2019).

Better Attribution
Another reason why many in the automotive industry continue to raise their digital budgets is that they can better pinpoint what channels are delivering real results. At the dealership level this is extremely beneficial since many owners are dealing with rising operating costs and narrowing profit margins. Dealers can use data to do more with the same or less ad spend and know that it is actually making an impact.

Where Should Budget Be Spent?

If You Are Thinking About a Marketing Budget Increase Consider:

Video
Auto dealers have historically always loved TV advertising however today’s consumers are watching more and more video through means other than traditional cable. If you are thinking of increasing your digital spend, important areas to consider are social media video, pre-roll, connected TV and over-the-top media services (OTT). Focusing on these video channels can get you more impressions, reaching a wider audience, with more tangible results. Learn more about AIM’s video services.

Inventory-Based Display
In addition to video, inventory based display advertising is a great option to maximize your digital marketing dollars. Inventory based ad creative can be served across a variety of platforms and the best part is it can be optimized for each individual consumer so they see your inventory that is most relevant to them. Learn more about our dynamic inventory ad solutions Data Driven Targeting (DDT) and Social Clicks.

Filed Under: Marketing, Websites Tagged With: Automotive Internet Media, Automotive Marketing, Dealership Advertising, Dealership Websites, Inventory Marketing

Buckle Up!

July 15, 2019 by Tony French

YOU’LL NEED TO BUCKLE UP FOR THIS ONE….

Once you try CarClicks Inventory Marketing you’ll see FAST results!

Kick your marketing into FULL-THROTTLE with CarClicks today- what are you waiting for?

Take the CarClicks Challenge and allow your dealership to get up to SPEED with online digital sales.

FUEL your dealership with highly accurate and relevant advertising campaigns.

Take the challenge today and start seeing results!

Are you not sure exactly what the CarClicks challenge is? Go ahead, give it a TEST DRIVE and sign up for our free online demo.

Get AHEAD of the competition today!

 

Filed Under: AIM Team, CarClicks, Marketing Tagged With: Automotive Marketing, carclicks, Dealership Advertising, Inventory Marketing

Dealers Doing Back Flips

June 26, 2019 by Tony French

Get More Energy from Your Dealership Marketing

Does your marketing feel like it’s moving at a turtle’s pace?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Check out our marketing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CarClicks dealers are performing full-twisting double back flips.

They have the agility of CarClicks marketing products on their side.

Take the CarClicks Challenge to learn how your marketing routine can score a perfect 10.0!

This is no Hare and the Tortoise folklore tale. It takes as little as 20 minutes to learn the power of CarClicks Inventory Marketing products.

 

Filed Under: AIM Team, CarClicks, Marketing Tagged With: Automotive Internet Media, Automotive Marketing, CarClicks Challenge

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