Digital Marketing Expert Witness Entity Map

Paid Search Advertising

What a paid search account can and cannot show about spend, keywords, clicks and conversions — and how fast each record expires

Relations:

• PART_OF → Paid Media

Paid search — buying ad placement against a user's query — is billed on clicks, which is why it is called PPC, pay per click. An attorney handed login credentials to a Google Ads account will see campaigns, keywords, spend, clicks, impressions and conversions, and will reasonably assume that is the record. It is a view onto it. Almost none of the underlying data is stored anywhere the advertiser controls. That distinction decides how a case is worked.

PPC Expert Witness: Paid Search and Google Ads — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Display and Programmatic

Where the record sits in a programmatic buy, what log-level data shows, and why viewability and ads.txt establish less than they appear to

Relations:

• PART_OF → Paid Media

A single programmatic impression — an ad bought by machine auction rather than by insertion order — may pass through the advertiser, its agency, a demand-side platform that buys, a supply-path optimization layer, an exchange, a supply-side platform that sells, the publisher's ad server, and finally the page. Each hop keeps its own log and takes a fee. No single party holds a record of the whole path. That is the defining evidentiary feature of the channel and the reason discovery here is expensive.

Display and Programmatic: Expert Witness Digital Ads — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Paid Social Advertising

What a Facebook or Instagram ad account export contains, what the Ad Library leaves out, and which breakdowns have already expired

Relations:

• PART_OF → Paid Media

For any paid social campaign there are three distinct records, and conflating them is the most common defect in exhibits here. The first is the advertiser's own account record — the Ads Manager or Campaign Manager export. For that advertiser it is close to complete: creative in every variant, targeting as configured, budget, delivery, spend, reported conversions, change history. It is available to the advertiser without any process at all, and obtainable from an agency by a Rule 34 request or under a contract audit right.

Social Media Ads Expert Witness: Paid Social — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Online Advertising

The orientation page for counsel who does not yet know which advertising channel a dispute turns on, and what to ask for first

Relations:

• PART_OF → Paid Media

An attorney who arrives at an online advertising expert witness usually arrives with a business problem, not a data problem: money was spent, results were promised, something went wrong, and nobody on the file can read the reports. The productive first move is not to argue about the numbers. It is to identify the channel, because that decides three things governing all that follows — what record exists, who holds it, how long it survives. The channels behave differently.

Online Advertising Expert Witness: Where to Start — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Social Media

What a social media record contains, how it is authenticated under Rules 902(13) and 902(14), and what an export cannot show

Relations:

• PART_OF → Organic and Owned

Organic social media — posts a party publishes rather than pays to place — produces a narrower record than most attorneys expect, and almost none of it is the page a browser renders. At minimum there is the post itself, with its content, timestamp, author account and privacy setting; the engagement record of reactions, comments, shares and saves; the reach and impressions figures the platform calculates and holds; the account's own activity log; and, where the platform keeps one, an edit history and some trace of deletion.

Social Media Expert Witness: Posts and Exports — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Email Marketing

What an email and SMS program records, why open rates stopped being evidence in 2021, and which consent rule is actually in force

Relations:

• PART_OF → Organic and Owned

An email service provider — the platform a sender uses to transmit bulk mail — keeps a layered record, and the layers are not equally reliable. Ranked from strongest to weakest: the send record, showing that the provider accepted a message for a given address at a given time; the SMTP result, meaning the receiving server's 2xx acceptance or 4xx / 5xx rejection; bounces, split between hard bounces (permanent, the address does not exist) and soft bounces (temporary, mailbox full or server unavailable); clicks, recorded when something requests a tracking

Email Marketing Expert Witness: The Send Record — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Affiliate Marketing

What affiliate network records contain, how cookie stuffing appears in a click log, and why a commission is not a finding of causation

Relations:

• PART_OF → Organic and Owned

Affiliate marketing pays a third-party publisher a commission on sales attributed to it. The attribution rule in almost universal use is last click: whichever affiliate link the buyer touched most recently before purchasing gets the credit. That combination creates a direct financial incentive to be the last click, regardless of whether the publisher did anything to cause the purchase, and every documented affiliate fraud pattern is a variation on that single theme.

Affiliate Marketing Expert Witness: Click Logs — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Content and Digital Media

What record exists for content production, publication and syndication — revision histories, captures, archives, and where each one fails

Relations:

• PART_OF → Organic and Owned

Content and digital media covers material a party publishes to be found, read or watched — articles, landing pages, video, product copy, sponsored placements and the feeds that carry them elsewhere. Disputes in this space almost always reduce to one of three questions, and each has a different record behind it. Was it produced? That is a deliverables question, answered from the statement of work, the delivery record and the publishing system, and it arises most often between a client and an agency or contractor.

Digital Media Expert Witness: Content Records — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

E-Commerce

Where the transaction record sits in an e-commerce dispute, who holds it, and how quickly the marketplace side of it expires

Relations:

• PART_OF → Commerce and Retail

In most e-commerce disputes the record that decides the question is the merchant's order data: the row-level table of what was sold, for how much, when, and from which landing URL. A platform's reported conversions are that platform's attribution model applied to that platform's own view of the world. The order table is a first-party record written on the merchant's own infrastructure at the moment money changed hands.

E-Commerce Expert Witness | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Retail and Merchandising

Assortment, placement, promotion and pricing presentation, and the records that fix what a shopper was shown on a given day

Relations:

• PART_OF → Commerce and Retail

Retail merchandising disputes come down to four things: assortment, which products were offered at all; placement, where those products appeared and in what order; promotion, what offer was attached to them; and pricing presentation, how the price and any comparison to it were displayed. Each of those is a decision, each was made in a system, and each of those systems keeps some record of when the decision changed. The records are almost entirely party-held.

Retail and Merchandising Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Website and Conversion

What a website's own logs, tags and experiment records establish, and where the session-replay litigation has actually left the field

Relations:

• PART_OF → Commerce and Retail

Server logs are the strongest and least used evidence in this field. Each entry records the request time, the requesting IP address, the user agent string, the requested address, the referrer, the response code and the bytes served. They are a first-party record on the operator's own infrastructure. They are not subject to an advertising platform's retention schedule, they are not gated by a consent banner, and they are not suppressed by an ad blocker.

Website and Conversion Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Analytics and Tracking

What an analytics property keeps, what it deletes on a schedule, what it models, and how to tell those apart in a production

Relations:

• PART_OF → Measurement

Analytics evidence is party-held, which sounds like good news until you notice that almost everything about it is a setting somebody can change. Before a figure in an export means anything, four things have to be established: the retention period, the reporting identity in force, the consent configuration, and the date and time of the extract. Two honest exports of "the same" period will not reconcile without those. So the configuration is evidence in its own right.

Analytics and Tracking Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Attribution and ROI

Why attribution numbers are estimates, what incrementality testing would have shown, and why it is almost never available afterward

Relations:

• PART_OF → Measurement

There is no primary record of which advertising caused which sale. Every figure claiming to say so is a model output, of one of four kinds. Data-driven attribution is a counterfactual estimate. It compares the paths of customers who converted to the paths of those who did not, and divides credit accordingly. It has no access to the world in which a touchpoint did not occur. Marketing mix modeling is a regression. Google classifies it, in its own documentation, as "causal inference from observational data" — and observational is not experimental.

Attribution and ROI Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Agency and Consultant Disputes

What a court can look to when no licensing board defines competent practice, and what a spend reconciliation actually shows

Relations:

• PART_OF → Performance and Contract

A negligence claim against a service provider requires the plaintiff to establish what a reasonably competent practitioner would have done, that the defendant fell below it, and that the shortfall caused the loss. In a licensed profession the first element arrives ready-made: a board, an examination, a published body of practice, a disciplinary mechanism. Digital marketing has none of those, and no general licensure requirement. It is worse than an absence.

Agency and Consultant Disputes | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Scope and Deliverable Disputes

Whether a deliverable named in the statement of work exists in the record, when it appeared, and which login put it there

Relations:

• PART_OF → Performance and Contract

A scope dispute asks a narrower question than a negligence claim, and that is its advantage. It does not ask whether the work was good. It asks whether the thing named in the statement of work exists, when it came into existence, and who put it there. Those are questions the record answers. The statement of work is therefore the operative document and the first thing to read, and the way it is drafted usually determines whether the dispute is resolvable at all.

Scope and Deliverable Disputes | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Performance-Based Compensation

Where an attribution dispute becomes a contract dispute, and which records show whether the metric was moved

Relations:

• PART_OF → Performance and Contract

Performance compensation looks like the cleanest arrangement in marketing services. The agency is paid on results, the client pays for outcomes, and the incentive is aligned. Then the parties fall out and discover that the contract's operative term — return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, revenue attributed to paid media, qualified leads — is not a measurement of anything that happened in the world. It is the output of a system that assigns credit, and that system is configurable by whichever party holds administrative access to the account.

Performance-Based Compensation | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Click Fraud and Invalid Traffic

What the invalid-clicks column and the credit report actually record, and why the click-level window closes at ninety days

Relations:

• PART_OF → Fraud and Abuse

"Click fraud" is a lay term. The industry term is invalid traffic , and the controlling taxonomy is the Media Rating Council's, set out in its Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Standards Addendum , updated June 2020. It splits invalid traffic in two, and the split does more work in litigation than anything else in the field.

Click Fraud and Invalid Traffic — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Affiliate and Incentive Fraud

What a network click log records about a commissioned conversion, and what the eBay cookie-stuffing prosecutions actually established

Relations:

• PART_OF → Fraud and Abuse

Affiliate marketing pays on attributed conversions, and the attribution rule in almost universal use is last click. That combination creates a direct financial incentive to be the last click, whether or not the publisher did anything to cause the purchase. Every documented affiliate fraud pattern is a variation on that single theme, and it is why the analysis in these matters looks different from a general fraud analysis: the question is rarely whether traffic was real, but whether the credited click did any work.

Affiliate and Incentive Fraud | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Bot Traffic and Impression Fraud

What has been proven about bot traffic, what was only reported by vendors, and what a buy-side log can actually support

Relations:

• PART_OF → Fraud and Abuse

In a click dispute the advertiser holds one genuinely independent record: its own web server's request log, written on its own infrastructure at the moment a visitor arrived. In an impression dispute there is no equivalent. Nothing arrives at the advertiser when an ad is displayed. Everything the advertiser knows about impressions comes from the platform that sold them or from a measurement vendor's tag placed in the ad-serving path — both of which are third-party accounts of an event nobody on the buy side observed directly.

Bot Traffic and Impression Fraud — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

False and Deceptive Advertising

Lanham Act false advertising and the FTC rules actually in force, including the one most compliance guides describe wrongly

Relations:

• PART_OF → Claims and Conduct

Federal false advertising claims run under Lanham Act section 43(a), codified at 15 U.S.C. 1125(a) . The provision has two halves and they are different claims. Subsection (a)(1)(A) reaches false designation of origin and unfair competition; subsection (a)(1)(B) is the false advertising provision, reaching misrepresentation of the "nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin" of goods, services or commercial activities. Courts phrase the elements differently. A representative statement, from Pizza Hut, Inc. v.

False and Deceptive Advertising — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Trademark Use in Advertising

What the Second, Ninth and Eleventh Circuits have decided about keyword bidding, and why the ad text is where liability still sits

Relations:

• PART_OF → Claims and Conduct

A keyword is the word a user types that an advertiser bids on to trigger an ad. Whether a competitor may bid on a brand's name is the question that brings most of these matters in the door. Three federal appellate courts have answered it on the merits within two years, and all three answered the same way. The Second Circuit affirmed judgment for Warby Parker in 1-800 Contacts, Inc. v. JAND, Inc.

Trademark Use in Advertising | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Traffic and Revenue Loss

How a decline is established, how alternative explanations are ruled out, and where a comparison series actually comes from

Relations:

• PART_OF → Loss and Quantification

Before anyone argues about cause, the decline has to be established as a fact about the world rather than a fact about a reporting system. That step gets skipped constantly. A traffic or revenue series has a definition, and the definition has changed several times inside the window most live disputes cover.

Traffic and Revenue Loss | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Marketing Damages Models

How marketing loss is quantified, what section 35(a) puts on which party, and where the marketing expert stops and the damages expert starts

Relations:

• PART_OF → Loss and Quantification

Counsel deciding what to plead is choosing among a short list, and the choice determines which records matter. Lost profits. What the claimant would have earned but for the conduct. Requires a but-for construction and isolation of the defendant's contribution from every other cause, which is the hardest thing on this page. Reliance or out-of-pocket. Amounts paid in reliance on the conduct: fees paid to an agency, media spend wasted, remediation cost.

Marketing Damages Models | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Search engine optimization

The practice of configuring a website and its content so search engines can crawl, understand and rank it, and the discipline most of the work on this site belongs to.

Same as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

The practice of configuring a website and its content so search engines can crawl, understand and rank it, and the discipline most of the work on this site belongs to.

SEO Consulting | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Search engine marketing

Marketing through search engines, a term used at different times to mean the umbrella covering both organic and paid work, and to mean paid placement alone.

Same as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing

Marketing through search engines, a term used at different times to mean the umbrella covering both organic and paid work, and to mean paid placement alone.

What Search Engine Marketing Includes — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Pay-per-click

Advertising sold on a per-click basis, and the model behind the paid results that sit above and around the organic ones.

Same as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-per-click

Advertising sold on a per-click basis, and the model behind the paid results that sit above and around the organic ones.

PPC Consulting | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Web analytics

The measurement and reporting of website traffic and behaviour, and the first place any claim about search performance has to be checked.

Same as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

The measurement and reporting of website traffic and behaviour, and the first place any claim about search performance has to be checked.

How Results Are Measured | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Core Web Vitals

Google's set of user-experience metrics measured from real user data at the 75th percentile, covering loading, interaction responsiveness and layout stability.

Same as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Web_Vitals

Google's set of user-experience metrics measured from real user data at the 75th percentile, covering loading, interaction responsiveness and layout stability.

Core Web Vitals in Practice | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

E-commerce

Selling online, and the context in which faceted navigation, product indexation and inventory state become search problems rather than merchandising ones.

Same as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce

Selling online, and the context in which faceted navigation, product indexation and inventory state become search problems rather than merchandising ones.

E-commerce SEO Consulting | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Paid Media

Where money was spent, and what the record says it bought.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Paid Search Advertising
• INCLUDES → Display and Programmatic
• INCLUDES → Paid Social Advertising
• INCLUDES → Online Advertising

Where money was spent, and what the record says it bought.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Organic and Owned

Channels a party controls rather than buys, and the records they leave.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Social Media
• INCLUDES → Email Marketing
• INCLUDES → Affiliate Marketing
• INCLUDES → Content and Digital Media

Channels a party controls rather than buys, and the records they leave.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Commerce and Retail

Where the transaction happens, and who holds the transaction record.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → E-Commerce
• INCLUDES → Retail and Merchandising
• INCLUDES → Website and Conversion

Where the transaction happens, and who holds the transaction record.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Measurement

The systems that claim to say what worked, and what they actually observe.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Analytics and Tracking
• INCLUDES → Attribution and ROI

The systems that claim to say what worked, and what they actually observe.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Performance and Contract

What was promised, what was delivered, and what the record shows.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Agency and Consultant Disputes
• INCLUDES → Scope and Deliverable Disputes
• INCLUDES → Performance-Based Compensation

What was promised, what was delivered, and what the record shows.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Fraud and Abuse

Traffic, clicks and conduct that were not what they appeared to be.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Click Fraud and Invalid Traffic
• INCLUDES → Affiliate and Incentive Fraud
• INCLUDES → Bot Traffic and Impression Fraud

Traffic, clicks and conduct that were not what they appeared to be.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Claims and Conduct

What was said publicly, to whom, and how it was targeted.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → False and Deceptive Advertising
• INCLUDES → Trademark Use in Advertising

What was said publicly, to whom, and how it was targeted.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Loss and Quantification

What the conduct cost, and how that number is built.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Traffic and Revenue Loss
• INCLUDES → Marketing Damages Models

What the conduct cost, and how that number is built.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Disciplines

The kinds of search marketing work offered here — organic search, paid search, platform and market specifics, and strategy — each labelled with how it is engaged: a one-off audit, a fixed-scope project, a retained engagement, or advisory.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Paid Search Advertising
• INCLUDES → Display and Programmatic
• INCLUDES → Paid Social Advertising
• INCLUDES → Online Advertising
• INCLUDES → Social Media
• INCLUDES → Email Marketing
• INCLUDES → Affiliate Marketing
• INCLUDES → Content and Digital Media
• INCLUDES → E-Commerce
• INCLUDES → Retail and Merchandising
• INCLUDES → Website and Conversion
• INCLUDES → Analytics and Tracking
• INCLUDES → Attribution and ROI

The kinds of search marketing work offered here — organic search, paid search, platform and market specifics, and strategy — each labelled with how it is engaged: a one-off audit, a fixed-scope project, a retained engagement, or advisory.

Disciplines | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness

Matters

Answers to the questions a search marketing buyer needs settled before spending anything: what the work is, how to choose someone, what it costs and how long it takes, and how any of it is measured.

Relations:

• INCLUDES → Agency and Consultant Disputes
• INCLUDES → Scope and Deliverable Disputes
• INCLUDES → Performance-Based Compensation
• INCLUDES → Click Fraud and Invalid Traffic
• INCLUDES → Affiliate and Incentive Fraud
• INCLUDES → Bot Traffic and Impression Fraud
• INCLUDES → False and Deceptive Advertising
• INCLUDES → Trademark Use in Advertising
• INCLUDES → Traffic and Revenue Loss
• INCLUDES → Marketing Damages Models

Answers to the questions a search marketing buyer needs settled before spending anything: what the work is, how to choose someone, what it costs and how long it takes, and how any of it is measured.

Matters | Digital Marketing Expert Witness — published by Digital Marketing Expert Witness