Paid traffic and ad labeling: FTC, ASA and the DSA

Paid traffic is advertising paid for by the view or click. It must be recognizable as an ad and truthful: a clear label, a named advertiser, no false claims.

Paying for attention

Everything you did in this part drew people in without direct payment: emails, posts, search. But there’s another way: paying a platform for a view or a click. This is called paid traffic, or advertising. Its important property is that the result appears at once and vanishes just as fast when you stop paying. So advertising is good for testing a hypothesis quickly (does the audience respond to your offer) and for filling gaps, not as the only source of people.

The main kinds for a small project:

• Search ads (Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising: ads above the results). You pay for the click of someone who has already typed a query. The intent is high (you studied query intent in the lesson on SEO), so for services it’s usually the first thing worth trying.
• Ads on social networks (Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, Reddit). You show an ad to people who searched for nothing but fit by their traits. The intent is lower, the reach wider. Targeting is limited for some topics: Meta, for example, restricts targeting for housing, jobs, credit and social issues, and the EU bans ads targeted by profiling on sensitive data.
• Placement with creators and in other people’s channels. More work to arrange, and the place with the most legal traps.

The Russian market. In Russia the usual platforms are Yandex Direct (search ads above the results) and VK Ads, together with placements in Telegram channels, and Google suspended its ads in Russia in 2022. Russia also has its own labeling regime, described in the last section for comparison.

How to count the money

A beginner often says “I’ll spend a little and see”. That’s not a plan. A plan writes down assumptions and derives the result from them. For advertising, five numbers are enough:

1. Money for a month that you’re ready to lose entirely.
2. The price of a click (CPC, cost per click): what one click costs. You learn it from the platform’s forecast; for local services it’s often a few dollars, and in competitive topics tens of dollars.
3. Clicks = money ÷ price of a click.
4. The conversion of a click into a lead (CR): the share of those who clicked who left a request. For a service page it’s often a few percent, but it’s an assumption until you have measured it.
5. Leads = clicks × conversion, and the cost of a lead (CPL, cost per lead) = money ÷ leads or, the same thing, price of a click ÷ conversion.

An example with invented numbers: $3,000, a $4 click, so 750 clicks; a 3% conversion gives about 22 leads; one lead costs about $136. Then comes the question most often forgotten: how many of the leads become clients, and how much does a client bring in? A lead at $136 is good if a client brings in $2,000, and a loss if $100. Recall the funnel from the part on copywriting and the value ladder: the result depends on every rung, not on the price of a click.

Three rules for not losing money:

• Start small, with one ad and one page it leads to.
• Set a spending cap and don’t raise it until you see leads.
• Links with UTM tags (the lesson on social networks): without them you won’t know which ad worked.

The ad: what to write in it

Google’s responsive search ads allow headlines of up to 30 characters and descriptions of up to 90 (the platforms’ rules change, so check the help page). The room is small, so don’t fill it with filler. Use what you have learned:

• The headline answers the person’s query (the four U’s: useful, urgent only if it’s true, unique, specific). For the query “boundary survey cost”, a headline such as “Boundary survey: price up front”.
• The text is one benefit and one condition, not a list of epithets (the lesson on FAB).
• The link leads to a page that continues the ad. If the ad is about a boundary survey, it goes to the section on boundary surveys, not the home page. A mismatch between ad and page is the main reason for expensive, empty clicks.
• The main action is the same as on the site (from the brief): the ad and the page should speak one language.

The law on promises

Advertising is subject to advertising law. As a guideline, not as advice:

• Advertising must be truthful. In the US, section 5 of the FTC Act bans deceptive and unfair practices, and claims need substantiation before you make them. In the UK the CAP Code (section 3) bans misleading advertising, and in the EU the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive does. You can’t state what isn’t so, or compare without grounds (“best”, “number one”, “twice as cheap”). For an expert this means no guarantees of results.
• The terms are stated at once. If a price is “from”, say from what, and what it depends on. Hidden terms break advertising law and consumer law.
• Professional ethics. Attorneys, doctors, accountants and others have rules of their own: for attorneys in the US, the state bar rules (based on ABA Model Rule 7.1) forbid false or misleading communications and many states add disclaimers and filing duties. If you belong to such a profession, show the ad to a lawyer or your licensing body before launch.

Disclosing that something is an ad

The core rule is the same in all three places: advertising must be recognizable as advertising, and the person must be able to see who is behind it.

• In the US. The FTC’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) say that when there’s a “material connection” between an advertiser and someone who endorses its product (payment, a free product, a family or employment tie), it must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, in the post itself and in the viewer’s own language, not tucked into a bio or a pile of hashtags. The advertiser can be held liable for an endorser’s missing disclosure, so you check the live posts. Native ads that look like editorial content must be identifiable too.
• In the UK. The CAP Code says marketing communications must be obviously identifiable as such (rule 2.1), and must make their commercial intent clear if it’s not apparent from the context (rule 2.3). The ASA’s guidance for influencers asks for a plain label such as “Ad” at the start of the post. The ASA also covers advertisers’ own social media.
• In the EU. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive bans hidden advertising (using editorial content to promote a product that the trader has paid for, without making that clear: Annex I, point 11). The Digital Services Act (Article 26) requires online platforms to let people see, for each ad, that it’s an ad, on whose behalf it’s shown, who paid, and the main parameters used to target it; very large platforms must also keep a public ad repository (Article 39). Platforms also add their own tools, such as Meta’s paid-partnership label.

Who is responsible. The advertiser, the creator or channel owner and the platform each have a part. Duties can be split by contract, but if a post goes out without a clear label, the advertiser may answer for it.

When it is simpler. If you buy ads in a large platform’s ad manager, the platform labels its own ads and keeps a library, and you’re left with getting the advertiser details right and the claims true. If you buy directly from a creator, you organize the chain yourself: a written contract, the label wording, a check of the live post.

For comparison: Russia. Since 1 September 2022 Russia has had a stricter, more bureaucratic regime for internet ads: the Russian word for “advertisement”, a token (ERID) in the link or text and advertiser details on the ad; the token is issued by an accredited ad data operator (ORD), which passes data on to a state registry (ERIR) kept by the communications regulator Roskomnadzor; fines for legal entities are large (Article 14.3 of the Administrative Offenses Code, to be checked against the current text). The Russian edition of this lesson covers it in full. The English-speaking jurisdictions rely instead on clear labels, platform libraries, and enforcement after the fact.

This is general information, not legal advice. The rules differ by country and change, and a creator’s post can be regulated in more than one country at once. Before a real campaign, ask a lawyer or the regulator: the FTC in the US, the ASA and CMA in the UK, your national consumer or advertising authority in the EU.

Open the diagram and experiment: choose where the ad is bought, and switch parts of the disclosure on and off. The diagram shows the order and the mistakes but doesn’t replace a lawyer.

Through a platform’s ad manager Directly from an influencer

the word “Ad” a “paid for by” line the paid-partnership tool “We guarantee results”

Boundary survey: book a consultation

We’ll tell you what to prepare and name the price before the visit.

1. You create the ad in the platform’s ad manager (Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager and so on).
2. The platform labels its own ads (Ad, Sponsored) and shows who paid.
3. The ad runs with the platform’s label, and you check that your advertiser details are right.
4. The platform keeps ad libraries in which anyone can look the ad up.
5. You keep your records and check that every claim in the ad is true.

What is wrong (3): there is no “Ad” label: an endorsement that is paid for must be clearly identifiable, and a vague tag or one buried in the text is not enough; there is no “paid for by” line naming the advertiser: platforms and some laws (for example the EU’s Digital Services Act) expect people to see who paid; the platform’s paid-partnership tool is off: for a creator’s post it is the way the platform shows the connection.

Check yourself: what does it take for an ad to be properly disclosed?

A clear “Ad” or similar label, placed up front where the person will see it, a way to see who paid, and, for a creator’s post, the platform’s paid-partnership tool. A vague tag isn’t enough.

Practice

Prepare the advertising on paper.

1. Two ads: one for search and one for a social network. A headline of up to 30 characters, a text of up to 90, leading to a section of the site from the brief, with an “Ad” label and a “paid for by” line.
2. The budget: money, price of a click, clicks, conversion, leads, cost of a lead. The numbers agree with each other.
3. The disclosure card: advertiser, creative, platform disclosure and records, label wording.
4. A check against the law and ethics. Who reads the text before launch.

The check looks at lengths, the label, the number and agreement of the figures, and forbidden words. Whether your ad is lawful in your case and for your profession is for a lawyer to decide: show them the text before launch.