PPC Myths No 1 – I’m getting conned…. Click Fraud!

As Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing specialists we at Specialist Online Marketing hear a lot of things about PPC when we’re talking to clients and potential clients. Perhaps the commonest stories we hear, certainly here in Yorkshire, are of click fraud. Everyone, it appears, seems to know some tale of office workers returning from the pub on a Friday afternoon to go on t’internet and click on competitors ads; of call centre workers being trained (almost Willy Wonka like) to Google competitors keywords and click onto their websites; of housewives up and down the country repetitively clicking onto rivals sites; of massive budgets being blown and companies being brought to their knees by the devious tactics of mischievous scallywags and the like.

Without delving into the motivation behind such behaviour, perhaps the first thing to consider is whether or not Google, Yahoo et al has considered this and whether their legions of PhDs and other highly trained, educated and paid people could possibly be a match for a load of slightly inebriated blokes and bored call centre workers? Google ranks as the 241st biggest corporation in America (in the 2007 Fortune 500 list – although its sales have grown by 56% then). It has annual revenues of over $16.5bn, almost all of which come from PPC Ads. Call me naïve or blasé but do you think they would put their reputation and the incredible income streams that this reputation allows them to generate, at risk for the sake of not dealing with one of the few potential weaknesses of their product?

There are rumours that some of the lesser search engines are not quite as rigorous in their pursuit of click fraud as the big 3, but in reality stopping repetitive clicking and identifying large volumes of clicks from a single ip address or range is not rocket science, certainly not when considering all the other stuff they are doing and amazing technological advances they are making. In most of our larger advertisers accounts, we see regular ‘quality adjustment’ credits, where Google has concerns over the validity of clicks and automatically pays back the cost of these.

Secondly any PPC manager worth their salt has fraud prevention procedures in place; regularly analysing traffic patterns to identify possible click fraud and notifying the search engines of any dubious traffic. It is the fundamental concept of PPC is that everything is traceable, so if a particular keyword is generating huge volumes of rapidly departing traffic i.e. bounces, or any level of poor quality, i.e. non-converting, traffic, your PPC manager should eliminate it as a matter of course. Likewise, if a particular area of the country is generating large volumes of poor quality/non-converting traffic, your PPC account manager will exclude it, even barring IP addresses or ranges from seeing your ads if necessary.

And finally the main point about PPC is that it is dynamic, flexible, responsive and controllable. If your PPC campaign isn’t working you either change it so that it does or you stop it. Call me naïve again, but I really struggle to understand how anyone can fall foul of some of the anecdotes I hear, with all the potential safeguards that are available.

One area that I do see has more scope for fraud and that is regularly discussed in Search Engine/Online Marketing circles are content ads and, in particularly, AdSense. Because Google shares the revenue of these ads with the owner of the website, there is a genuine incentive for the website owner to become a happy clicker. However, that said, Google deliberately prices content clicks at much lower rates than search clicks, every click is still traceable so particular sites with high levels of poor quality traffic can be excluded and (again) dubious IP addresses be excluded from seeing your ads, so, once more, you can get really good value advertising from the content network if you run it correctly.

When considering the ways that newspapers and television stations regularly over inflate their readership and viewing figures to sell their advertising (which has no guarantee of even being seen, let alone result in an action), it seems almost churlish to moan about people deliberately taking the time to click onto a site and incur a cost to the advertiser of a few pennies each time. Click fraud does happen but you must put it into context. We at Specialist Online Marketing deliver highly effective PPC advertising that gets results, almost always at a far higher level of cost effectiveness and profitability than any other form of advertising. Though the yarns we hear are very entertaining and will always get people talking down the pub, most of what we hear has an element of ‘a bad workmen blames his tools’ about it. Perhaps its not quite so entertaining to talk about really boring nerds who spend hours analysing data to generate high quality traffic which delivers fantastic results and makes PPC marketing the most profitable form of advertising available?

Coming soon PPC Myths No 2 but if you have any PPC Stories, Myths, Fallacies or Rumours you want discussing please contribute!

Peter Van Zelst is founder of Specialist Online Marketing, PPC Search Marketing Specialists and Makers of More Profitable Search Marketing for Your Business. Visit http://www.specialistonlinemarketing.com to see how Profitable PPC Search Marketing could benefit your business.