HUMAN Blog

Come Together: Marketing & Security

Written by Rosemary Cipriano | February 15, 2022

The first rule of marketing fraud was to not talk about marketing fraud, until now. In 2021 we released our Marketing Fraud Benchmarking Report where we learned two thirds of respondents had experienced some sort of marketing fraud in the past year. If it’s so prevalent, why isn't it a bigger part of the security conversation? 

Forrester just released their report, “Now is the Time for Security and Marketing to Team Up to Fight Marketing Fraud,” where they discuss why security leaders and marketers must work together. Marketing fraud has significant downstream effects such as wasted marketing budget on bots and skewed analytics. Our research in the Marketing Fraud Benchmarking Report, found that 43% of respondents didn’t know whether the traffic coming to their website was human or bot. And if it’s a bot, that leads to wasted money retargeting that lead, wasted time from sales trying to turn that fake lead into a customer, and ultimately, less accurate marketing metrics. The more successful fraudsters are, the more they’ll target marketers. Forrester says in their report, “marketing and security pros have a shared interest in fighting these attacks and must collaborate to do so effectively.”

By working together, marketers and security teams can unite against fraud. And when they do, the results speak for themselves. Recently we worked with a luxury automotive brand because of suspicions there was bot activity on their site. We were not only able to spot where the bot activity was coming from, but the marketing team used this intelligence to increase their conversion rate by 600%. Tackling marketing fraud doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your conversion rates - it means more accurate data, smarter budget allocation, and a rise in conversion rates.

Check out Forrester’s report to learn how to holistically approach fraud, improve ROI, and ultimately unite the silos between your marketing and security teams.

Keep marketing human.