Re: False Clicks/Click Fraud

From: Miki Dzugan <mdzugan_at_roi-web.com>
Date: Thu 17 Aug 2006 13:06:42 -0500

David,

Thank you for sharing your research with us. This is important
information and advertisers and PPC search engines alike should be
concerned, especially the search engines.

In my opinion the fraud affects the PPC engines more than the
advertisers. Here's my reasoning, when I am managing PPC programs for
clients I am not looking at the clicks so much as I am looking for
sales. We are managing to an average cost per sale. Fraudulent clicks do
not produce sales, so we reduce what we are willing to bid for those
keywords that are bringing the non-producing traffic.

We have used several second tier PPC engines in the past, who were not
able to keep up with the click fraud problem and so they produced poor
results which caused us to cancel our programs with them. One of our
clients is a college and online college programs are a significant
source of click fraud, especially on an international basis. The smaller
PPC platforms are really struggling because few advertisers are able to
run successful programs with them.

Advertisers can take steps to defend themselves against click fraud by
carefully tracking results and managing programs on a results basis
rather than budget spend basis. Rather than bid on very general terms,
target more specific terms. It may take 100 "tail" search terms to bring
the amount of traffic that one general term brings, but the click fraud
is likely to be lower. As suggested earlier, one can eliminate
"contextual" ads, but we have found that judicious use of context ads
can deliver good results.

As to making a law to avoid click-fraud, I can't imagine any way that an
effective law could be created. After all, we have laws against spam and
you see how well that works.

--

Miki Dzugan
Rapport Online Inc
Internet marketing for results, that's ROI.
http://www.roi-web.com
Office: 928-284-2704
Cell: 651-224-8709

 







Received on Thu Aug 17 2006 - 13:06:42 CDT