Hearst Digital - KSBW NBC TV/Hearst Digital Waste of time engaging with their digital advertising services and support

Engaged in a two month trial period of their digital display advertising package.

Performance on the display advertising was very likely artifiically inflated with automated impressions/clicks.  The overall performance of the two month campaign was consistent with bot generated traffic, with bounce rates above 90%, less than 10 seconds per click session, and an average of just barely over 1 page per visit.  Early in the campaign, we called this to their attention and they claimed they were working to resolve it.

We get significantly better results from simple text based Google AdWords campaigns at .40/click than using the variety of graphic based display ads with Hearst at over $5.00/click. Unsure where they fail to execute correctly, but something is broken somewhere.  

At the end of the period, the sales guys claimed there were almost a dozen conversions but could not demonstrate this with their reporting and the Google Analytics for our site also did not suggest that there was a single conversion that happened.

While they claimed they would send weekly reports through the duration, there were only two that they could get together which showed very little data.  The team became increasingly unresponsive as the weeks went by and would simply not resond to questions.

The sales guys we dealt with seemed to have little understanding of the services they were selling and were largely unable to provide any insight into the product offerings during the duration - it was always, let us get in touch with their partner Core to help get the answers.

Between the failure to provide adequate visibility of the campaign through the test duration with timely reporting, the likelihood of artificially inflated click through rates, and the mysterious conversions that they claim to have seen but can not back up with reporting - I would steer clear from this organization.