Archive: January, 2009

Click Fraud sounds like something that should never be allowed in stilettos, but the reality of the situation is that click fraud is an umbrella term for a myriad of shell games whose sole purpose is to artificially conjure up click rates in a bid to produce more voluptuous Internet marketing invoices for companies ranging from basement start-ups to mega corporations. Many in the industry consider click fraud to be the deadliest poison threatening the Internet’s fledgling advertising models, a threat that has the fantastic minds at Google and Yahoo! shaking with the question of how to put the issue in the dirt.

Let’s be very clear before we go any further on this issue – there are a kaleidoscope of customers who are pleased with the returns from their ads on legitimate search results on Yahoo! or Google. The bag of poison begins to seep though when these same productive and lucrative ads are recycled across the Internet and businesses that only conduct their affairs in North America or Europe suddenly end up getting billed for clicks from outfits in such capitalist heavyweights as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. Remember, there’s nothing on the books to say the clicks have to be relevant – a click is a click by any other name, and the bill is still due.

Pay Per Click is a big hairy beast in the Search Engine Optimization business. It’s known by other
names – Pay Per Placement, Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Position, or Cost Per Click – but a rose is
rose by any other name. Because there are big dollars at stake in Internet Marketing, the space or
geography around or associated with keyword search results is a highly valued commodity – the
very real estate that holds your search results has value and can be purchased because the seeker
has already played their hand – based on their search request, you know what he or she is looking
for, and if it’s a match with what you’re selling, then it’s a match made for commerce.
Simply put, Pay Per Click is an Internet advertising model that associates your site with the top
search engine results generated from keywords that match the phraseological units encompassing
your product or service. And let’s not pull any punches here – the highest bidder for a popular
keyword will find their ad positioned higher in the search results, thereby increasing the chances
of a like-minded click to your site.
So who’s paying who? There are no fees to list your advertisement. But as the name implies, the
retailer pays their PPC provider every time a searcher clicks the ad that connects to your site. At its
core, Pay Per Click is a proven method to drive targeted traffic to your site. The Pay Per Click
advertising model has grown from its infancy into a multi-billion dollar industry with Pay Per
Click providers growing more feature-rich offerings such as the ability to select the preferred
country and language for your advertisement, and for those who have bitten off more than they
can chew, there has been a predominant growth in bid management services to help manage your
Pay Per Click campaigns across multiple engines.
In fact, Pay Per Click is such a cornerstone of Internet Marketing, that content publishers have
also entered the game by adding products like Google’s PPC Adsense, Yahoo! Search Marketing,
and Microsoft adCenter to their sites. It is now standard fair that Pay Per Click initiatives fall into
one of two camps: sponsored match campaigns and content match campaigns. Sponsored match
campaigns promote advertisements on search engine results pages, while on the other hand,
content match campaigns promote advertisements on publisher websites, newsletters, and emails.
Although search engines have gone to great lengths to guard against disreputable practices in the
world of Pay Per Click – like implementing automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by
competitors or corrupt webmasters – the PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click
fraud.