Click Fraud and Search
If you haven’t heard about click fraud and search engines, you should educate yourself before buying any PPC advertising. Even if you have heard about it, you should always take a quick peek at articles talking about it: there are so many forms of it, and I’m not convinced I’ve come across everyone who is aware of every form it takes. Myself included.
It takes many forms, but all share the same end result. Imagine paying to have your company’s commercial run on TV. You pay for prime time air space on a hit show with a targeted audience of 20 million. Instead, your commercial runs at 3 AM, and once 20 million insomniacs who don’t fit your market at all see the ad, it’s over.
Welcome to the perils of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. So far, most people have been accepting it as an unavoidable risk. But take the above scenario with the TV commercial, and imagine that the insomniacs are getting paid to watch your ad. And maybe, just maybe, the person paying them is a rival company.
Suddenly “just the way the cookie crumbles” seems inadequate to explain.
Harrison said she didn’t know a thing about the problem until a former employee formed a rival firm and started to repeatedly click on her ads as a competitive tactic. The fraudulent clicks frequently exceeded spending limits Harrison had set, knocking her ads out of the display rotation.
From: Click fraud looms as threat to search engine
What’s the solution? If everybody does this to their competitors, PPC advertising will be worthless. There are companies out there who will watch this sort of thing for you – for a price. They spot clicks that don’t look kosher, and can ban the IP’s and use other various tactics to stop them. For the little guy, the cost is significant, but most little guys aren’t targets for this sort of thing. By the time you’re big enough to have problems with PPC, you should be able to afford one of these services that can help.
Still, it’s gonna be a race as the fraudsters keep coming up with more ways to do this stuff, and the good guys race to find ways of stopping them that don’t cause more problems.
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