Scottie Scheffler was in unfamiliar territory early Friday morning, as he was arrested en route to the PGA Championship at Valhalla.
The ordeal had Scheffler feeling “pretty rattled, to say the least,” and he admitted it took him a “few holes” to feel somewhat normal again.
But in a somewhat ironic twist (he is facing a felony charge of second-degree assault on a police officer), the officers who were involved in placing Scheffler in custody wound up playing a role in calming him down.
“The officer that took me to the jail was very kind, he was great. We had a nice chat in the car, that kind of helped calm me down. I was sitting there waiting to go in, and I asked him, I was like ‘Can you just come hang out with me for a few minutes so I can calm down?…’” Scheffler said after his round. (He even joked that he had been stretching in a jail cell.)
“The officers inside the jail were tremendous.”
Scheffler even said he was the butt of some jokes made inside the jail “when they figured out who I was and what happened and how I ended up there.”
“This one older officer looked at me when I was doing my fingerprints and looks at me and goes ‘Do you want full experience today?’ I looked at him and go, ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ He was like ‘Come on man, do you want a sandwich?’ I was like ‘sure, I’ll take a sandwich. I didn’t eat breakfast yet.’ They were really kind.
“I’m thankful that we have such strong police. They’re our protectors out there. We just got into a chaotic situation this morning. That’s really all it was.”
Scheffler was detained at 6:01 a.m. ET and released just over two-and-a-half hours later, and arrived at Valhalla another half hour after that, 56 minutes before his tee time.
Starting on the back nine, the reigning Masters champion naturally birdied 10 to start the day. He followed with a bogey on 11 but responded with a birdie on 12.
After five-straight pars, he then ripped off four birdies in his next eight holes.
He finished the round two shots back of the lead, as Collin Morikawa rattled off five straight birdies at a point to head into the clubhouse at -11; Scheffler was -4 after the first round.
Scheffler was booked into the Louisville Department of Corrections later Friday. He was also charged with criminal mischief, reckless driving and disregarding signals from an officer directing traffic.
I’m Isabella Otoo, a full stack developer from Microverse with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Atlantic International University.
Location: Ghana
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, POSTGRESQL,RUBY, RUBY ON RAILS, GIT, GITHUB
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qJiWXviAy0Jmw-Oorsp-lYM8wTs…
Email: isabellaotoo25@gmail.com
The charred remains of the Formula One car Romain Grosjean crashed at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix will go on display at a new exhibition in Madrid next month.
In the quest for more conversions, there’s an element most PPC advertisers overlook; invalid traffic—aka IVT, fake traffic, click fraud, or ad fraud.
You might have noticed the IVT column in your Google Analytics dashboard, although it isn’t displayed by default. And if you’ve ever searched for invalid traffic online, you have probably read Google or Facebook’s policies on the matter.
IVT is common. In fact, invalid ad traffic accounts for over ten percent of digital ad traffic.
Marketers often assume tech giants are in control of IVT. But are they? And how much actual invalid traffic really makes it through to your paid ads?
The Challenges of Digital Advertising
Although pay-per-click advertising is one of the most important elements of digital marketing, its reputation has taken a beating in recent years.
Marketers have watched CPC rise, an increase in competition, less-than-accurate tracking, and even noticed they’re paying for fake or fraudulent traffic that doesn’t drive results.
Plus, consumer groups have been campaigning for more privacy and control over our personal data.
So, where does this leave the average marketer?
First, some stats.
Between 40 and 60 percent of all internet traffic is from non-human sources. This includes bots, web crawlers, and other automated scripts. Despite the wide range, we can assume, on average, that around half of all web traffic is non-human.
It’s also estimated that ‘bad bot’ traffic outnumbers good bots, with bad bots conducting up to 25 percent of total internet activity. Bad bots can include spam bots, scalpers, or data harvesters, to the bots used for hacking, stealing logins, or committing ad fraud.
Added to this, marketers are also seeing their tracking and targeting capabilities changing as Google and Facebook adapt to the changing data laws around the world.
The growth of fake traffic combined with reduced targeting and analytics sounds like a recipe for a marketer’s headache.
But Facebook and Google are putting a stop to all this—right?
The Battle Against Fake Traffic
In 2021, the cost of click fraud and ad fraud was estimated to be around $42 billion.
The tech giants have long claimed their invalid traffic filters remove the worst of the bots and bad clicks.
And those IVT rates in Google Analytics might be encouraging.
Most marketers using Google Analytics see an IVT rate in the low single figures, somewhere between 2 to 8 percent.
But data from ClickCease shows an average of 14 percent of clicks on paid ads come from non-genuine sources, aka click fraud. Some industries even see click fraud levels way beyond this, with invalid clicks making up 60 percent of traffic.
Why the discrepancy? Surely the big ad platforms would want to put a stop to fake traffic?
The truth is, it’s complicated.
On the one hand, yes: Google, Facebook, and Microsoft do want to put a stop to fake traffic and protect their advertisers. After all, advertising revenue is by far the biggest earner for all of these companies.
However, the methods they use to filter invalid traffic are considered less strict than third-party click fraud solutions.
A common way for click fraud and ad fraud operators to get around the filters is by masking their location. Most ad platforms block traffic sources by IP address. Using a VPN, bots and click farms can cycle through multiple IP addresses to click repeatedly without getting blocked.
In fact, the click thresholds for the ad platforms are thought to be much more generous than using a third-party fraud blocker.
For the more cynical amongst us, there is also the issue of money.
Fake clicks are still a source of income to the ad platforms. And for many advertisers, the metric they’re looking for (beyond just conversions) is a good click through rate.
More clicks or impressions equals a bigger reach and a job well done, right?
For the ad giants, so long as advertisers see something is being done, then the fight against click fraud is winning in some way.
Well, I did say that’s the cynical view.
Protect Your Advertising Spend With Click Fraud Blocking
Blocking invalid traffic using a third-party solution is the most effective way to block bots, automated clicks, and even malicious traffic such as brand haters and competitors.
For starters, the clicks lost to fake traffic are more than just lost budget.
Companies operating on a limited ad budget might find their daily or monthly ad spend exhausted prematurely. With their ads out of service, the missed opportunities will go to their competitors.
For those operating with a bigger ad budget, the issue of misattributed success comes into play.
How can you tell if those impressions or clicks resulted in conversions? Well, it’s increasingly difficult.
A tool such as ClickCease doesn’t just block bad traffic in real time and flag suspicious activity. It also offers another level of analytics marketers can use to examine their audience – something becoming more crucial as the tracking changes come into play.
Seeing which search terms attract the most invalid traffic, or how many VPN or out-of-geo clicks your ads, attract allows advertisers to adjust their targeting.
This applies to search and display ads on Google or Bing Ads, and social media ads such as Facebook or Instagram.
Marketers looking to get ahead of the trends, especially as the tracking changes come into play, should take the opportunity to see how click fraud blocking makes a difference to their campaign results.
FiscalNote is the leading technology provider of global policy and market intelligence. We are turning insights into action to help stay ahead of rapidly evolving political, corporate, and regulatory environments.
We offer 100% remote positions, you can learn more about our benefits and see all of our open roles on our careers page: https://careers.fiscalnote.com/
On the FiscalNote team, we’re hiring experienced Rails Engineers to scale influence the trajectory of the FiscalNote application. I’ve listed the job description below, and you can reach out to recruiting.team@fiscalnote.com with any questions!
Predata (part of FiscalNote) is the only web-based platform that quantifies shifts in online attention – how audiences research and consume information – to provide a more complete picture of the geopolitical landscape. We’re looking for the first DevOps Engineer to join the team to design, implement, and manage a secure microservice infrastructure. If this sounds fun, check out the job description or send an email to recruiting.team@fiscalnote.com! https://jobs.lever.co/fiscalnote/3e664eb4-53f8-4c86-9664-7c5…
Over the last month (4 weeks) I’ve been running television ads for my company, NP Digital, on CNBC and Bloomberg in the United States.
If you aren’t familiar with those channels, they are stock channels. And to get even more specific, my ads are running during the hours the stock market is open, from 9:30 am to 4 pm eastern standard time.
Now every once in a while, my ads run a bit before the market opens and even a bit after… but that’s roughly the time the ads air. And they only air Monday through Friday which are the days the stock market is open.
Before I dive into how the ads performed, let me give you a bit of background first…
My theory behind running TV ads
Online advertising is becoming expensive. Just look at Facebook and Google, it costs more to run an ad now than it did a year ago.
Google and YouTube went up by 108%
Facebook had up to an 89% increase, while the average CPM was $11
TikTok having a 92% increase and
Snapchat with “the lowest” at a 64% increase
So why not try something different…
In the ad agency world, people run ads for their clients, but no one really runs ads on TV for themselves (at least in the United States from what I can tell).
So our team decided to take the plunge and give it a chance.
We also felt that it could provide an ROI because as an ad agency we see tons of data. And for many of our customers we are seeing TV ads from a cost to acquire a customer to be a bit more expensive than Facebook ads, and a bit less expensive than Google ads.
Plus, we thought it would bring credibility. Because even though we have 450 employees globally and we operate globally… being 4 or so years old hurts. Mainly from the aspect of bigger brands work with bigger companies.
There’s a saying in the business world, you don’t get fired for hiring IBM. The same goes with hiring a big holding company brand like WPP, Dentsu, or Omnicom in the marketing world.
It’s slowly changing though as people care for results over anything else. Especially with marketing.
So my thought was running TV commercials for NP Digital would be great if it could drive leads PLUS help build our brand. Eventually, I want people to say “you don’t get fired for hiring NP Digital”.
The commercials
We ran 3 commercials.
The commercials were shown randomly on those 3 channels and had close to an even rotation over the course of the 4 weeks.
By having our URL at the end we were hoping for more website traffic and leads as well as branding.
I personally thought the ads were clever, funny and the quality of them made us look like a large agency.
One thing to note with the ads is not everyone was bald. We had a woman wear a bald cap and we had a few men also wear a bald cap. Just so everyone could look somewhat like me.
The results
Well here is an example of one of the weeks:
My cost per visit was roughly $69.11 which is expensive.
The number of leads we could tie from the TV commercial was a whopping 0.
But, we did see our brand queries go up.
In essence, they were working from that end, in which people would watch the commercial then search for “NP Digital” on Google and head to our site.
But again still 0 leads from at least what we could tell, but again the tracking wasn’t perfect.
On a brighter note, though a lot of my friends messaged me saying they saw my commercial.
We even had someone email us saying “bloody amazing commercial”. They weren’t interested in our services, but it was nice to at least get that email.
Would I run TV ads again?
TV ads work for a lot of businesses, especially DTC ecommerce companies.
For us though, it wasn’t the most effective.
But here is what’s funny. I am still going to run them. I want to try it out for 11 more months and see what happens.
I’m a big believer in branding.
Just thinking about shoes… you wear Nike not because of a Google search, you just know their brand.
The same goes with Visa, BMW, Louis Vuitton, and even Lululemon.
Branding is priceless and if you want to be a big business you have to invest in it.
Here’s a quick stat for you, did you know that more people search for “Nike” in the United States on Google than they do for the word “shoes”? That’s the power of branding.
My goal, or more so “hope” is that after a year of burning $1.2 million more people will recognize us and see us as a serious contender. And it will help with the rule of 7, in which when companies see or interact with your brand 7 times, they are more likely to evangelize it and sign up as a customer.
Another thing I am going to try is adjusting the hours the ad is run and maybe even the channels.
Eventually, I will adjust the creatives and try new ads, but I will continue to run the 3 above for at least another quarter or two.
Conclusion
If you want to be a big company, you have to build a brand.
Brands are priceless. Your brand is what’s going to get you more business in the long run.
Now that doesn’t mean you have to run TV commercials like me to build a brand, you can use any channel you want. From SEO to social media to TV… the possibilities are endless. Heck even building an amazing product or providing an amazing service helps build brands.
The next time you make a purchase ask yourself why. The chances are because you are familiar with the company’s brand.
59% of consumers prefer to buy new products from brands they are familiar with.
Don’t take branding for granted.
And of course, if you need help with your branding, check out my agency. 😉
skills: Data analysis (SPSS/Statistics/BESA/in-house software), writing/reviewing research articles, recruiting/building profiles of participants, experimental design organization and finalization, literature review.
About me:
I’m a graduate neuroscience research student with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics. My master’s degree is currently on pause due to the pandemic. My research focus is on early cognitive development, languages, and theory of mind.
I have worked with both EEG and fMRI. That includes:
Data analysis (SPSS/(matlab/R)/BESA/in-house software), writing/reviewing research articles, recruiting participants, experimental design organization and finalization, & literature review.
I’m always open to learning new technologies.
As my experience has been in child development research, I’m open to teaching facilitator and research roles.
Open to both full-time positions and support roles too.
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