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Click Fraud And Search Engine Marketing |
By:
Mark Daoust |
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Click Fraud and Search Engine Marketing Published by PPC-List.com
Whether it be an overanxious affiliate of a pay per click search
engine, or the search engine itself, if you have participated in
search engine marketing you have most likely found yourself to
be the victim of click fraud, whether you know it or not. Click
fraud is tainting the image of many pay per click search engines
and costing advertisers far too much money. Although the
negative effects of click fraud are obvious to both advertisers
and pay per click search engines, many engines do not take the
necessary steps to curb click fraud. The result is that you are
losing money
Types of Click Fraud
Forced Traffic and Robot Traffic
The most egregious form of click fraud comes from forced
traffic. Utilizing pop-ups, start page exchanges, and other mass
traffic generation tools, the person committing the fraud forces
traffic through paid listings. For example, if the person
committing click fraud were to use pop-ups, rather than have a
pop-up display the content of an ad, the pop-up is used deliver
a visitor to the click URL that the engine uses to track
traffic. The search engine does not know that the click was not
user generated, but rather generated by a pop-up. As a result
the search engine deducts money from the advertiser’s account
and considers the pop-up to actually be a click. The affiliate
then gets paid for delivering nothing more than a pop-up. Many
PPC’s have attempted to reduce the ability of affiliates to
force traffic to their listings. Using unique session logging
and requiring a valid HTTP referrer are a couple of ways click
fraud is being reduced by some pay per click search engines.
Even with these methods in place, some people have still
discovered ways to force traffic to paid listings. The best
defense a PPC has against forced traffic is to perform routine
audits on their network and their affiliates.
Robot traffic is a form of forced traffic, however, instead of
having the click URL load fully in a user’s browser the click
URL is merely called by an automated program. Search engines
that do not guard against this type of traffic will once again
consider this to be a legitimate click. The danger with robot
traffic is that it can be generated innocently by search engines
crawling the web. Fortunately most search engines distinguish
between spidered traffic and real traffic.
Excessive International Traffic
Although the Internet transcends most international borders,
excessive traffic from Asia often signal generally poor quality
traffic from your search engine. This traffic is particularly
dangerous to your advertising campaigns as most advertisers do
not know how to distinguish traffic origins by country. More
dangerous yet is the fact that many search engines do nothing to
filter out excessive international traffic. International
traffic is considered valid traffic by these engines as it is
user originated traffic.
International traffic is not what most advertisers are hoping to
spend their money on when starting a pay per click search engine
campaign. The target market of most advertisers includes the
U.S., Canada, Great Britain, other European countries, and
possibly Australia. In addition to the traffic not being truly
focused, this excessive international traffic also has a greater
chance of being generated through incentivized or fraudulent
means.
Sport and Competitor Clicking
In highly competitive pay per click scenarios advertisers may
turn to dishonest means to hurt their competition. Such is the
case with competitor clicking. Competitor clicking is the act of
clicking on listings for the sake of costing another advertiser
money. In an extreme case of competitor clicking, one company
may click a listing several times in a row with the hope of
depleting their competition’s funds.
Sport clicking works in a similar fashion, however, instead of a
competitor clicking on a listing a non-interested party clicks
on expensive keywords. When a person comes across an expensive
pay per click listing, many times they become interested in who
would pay for such a listing. Other people just simply click on
listings because they know it costs the advertiser money.
Regardless of their motivation, advertisers have unfortunately
become familiar with visitors from pay per click search engines
that do not have any real interest in their service.
Although it is not possible for a search engine to completely
eliminate competitor and sport clicking as it is impossible to
know initially the difference between an interested visitor and
a visitor with ill-intent, it is possible for search engines to
guard against excessive clicking. Frequency caps are the most
effective means to guard against this form of click fraud. A
frequency cap will limit the number of times an advertiser is
charged for a visitor within a set amount of time. For example,
if a listing is clicked by an individual, the advertiser will be
charged. If that same individual clicks on the same listing
again within a short amount of time, the advertiser will not be
charged for the second click. Avoid Companies Who Don’t Avoid
Click Fraud
It is a simple rule, but a rule that is not followed very
closely by most marketers. If the search engines you are
advertising with are not careful to avoid those who are prone to
committing click fraud, chances are good that advertising with
them will result in losing money to click fraud. Search engines
that are actively pursuing click fraud tend to have stringent
requirements to become a distribution partner. Other search
engines that actively pursue click fraud set themselves up to
not encourage click fraud, possibly by not using partner
networks or possibly by not paying their partners on a per click
basis.
Look for Publicly Held Companies
Search engines that have stringent guidelines on who can
distribute their results tend to have more success in reducing
click fraud. Publicly held companies, because of their
accountability to long-term profitability and their shareholders
are masters at performing due diligence on a website before
accepting it as a distribution partner.
The two largest publicly held pay per click search engines are
Overture and FindWhat. Both companies
examine sites wishing to distribute their search results with
great detail. Every partner site is required to perform a
minimum amount of traffic. Sites that achieve their minimum
traffic requirements are signals that the site has a loyal and
committed customer base. In addition, every site goes through a
rigorous audit which is intended to reveal sources of traffic
and fully understand how their feed will be used on that site.
Besides filtering out click fraud through initial partnership
requests, publicly held companies routinely perform audits on
their distribution networks and employ the latest technology to
find instances of click fraud.
Use PPC Spin-offs
Frustrated by the vast amounts of click fraud and the rising
costs of keywords at most PPC’s, many advertiser’s have left the
world of pay per click search engine marketing in search for
other advertising venues. To meet the needs of this ever growing
demographic, a few search engines have developed programs
similar that resemble pay per click search engines in the
results that advertiser’s see without the negative effects such
as click fraud.
The most successful model of these spin-offs is TowerSearch. Rather than
using a pay per click model requiring that advertisers deposit
funds, bid on keywords, then subsequently deduct the bidded
amount from their deposited funds for every click recorded,
TowerSearch opens up their traffic to advertisers without
charging them on a per click basis. Their program is an ideal
alternative to per click marketing and paid inclusion programs.
Where paid inclusion programs do not guarantee a top position
for any of the keywords you target, and where pay per click
marketing does not offer the flat fee for inclusion in their
database, TowerSearch steps up. TowerSearch guarantees both a
top position as well as a flat monthly fee for that guaranteed
top position.
Highly reputed ExactSeek also offers a program that guarantees placement for a flat
fee. Advertisers can buy a guaranteed placement of a featured
listing box for any keyword they choose for a flat fee. With the
draw that ExactSeek has in addition to the cost benefits,
ExactSeek is the perfect alternative to the relatively highly
priced Google AdWords.
By offering flat-fee guaranteed placement, both TowerSearch and
ExactSeek have taken click fraud out of the equation of search
engine marketing. Neither company currently offers an affiliate
program to distribute listings on a per click revenue sharing
basis; rather, they both rely on traffic they can generate
without tempting other webmasters simply drive clicks to their
listings. In addition, neither company’s model lends itself to
click fraud as clicking on a listing will not cost the
advertiser any money. By adjusting their model’s slightly
TowerSearch and ExactSeek are safe bets for advertiser’s looking
to spend their money wisely.
Do Not Rely On Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay per click marketing is a valuable resource, however, with
the vast amounts of resources available to find quality top
placements in free search engines, no marketer should be relying
solely on pay per click marketing. For most webmasters, the
prize search engine to obtain a top ranking in is Google. With
all the free information available from sites such as JimWorld’s
Forums, FreeWebSiteSubmission, and SearchGuild, it is possible
for every webmaster to learn how they can capitalize on the
extreme success of Google.
In addition to offering a great pay per click alternative,
Exactseek’s free listings are a great resource for webmasters
looking for free traffic. Exactseek’s offers several different
programs to help every webmaster achieve a higher ranking in
their listings. Recently they announced a change in their
ranking algorithm. Rather than focusing solely on keyword
relevance which has so often been abused by dishonest
webmasters, Exactseek’s now takes into account a website’s
popularity as judged by Alexa. Two websites that are equal in
relevancy will achieve their position by how popular Alexa
judges them to be. Not only does this provide better results for
end uses, but it opens up new possibilities for webmasters to
capitalize off of Exactseek’s popularity.
Conclusion Search engine marketing is still the best marketing
available to bring high quality visitors and convert visitors
into paying customers. Whether it is through pay per click
programs, pay per click spin-offs, or through free listings,
every marketing plan needs to include search engine marketing.
Unfortunately the reality of search engine marketing is that
click fraud exists. By focusing your search engine marketing on
companies that are less susceptible to click fraud, your
marketing campaigns will see a solid ROI.
PPC-List.com is an online resource for pay per click search
engines. This article may be reproduced in its entirety as long
as PPC-List is attributed as the author.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article41694.html |
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