When promoting your business, an attractive option is to use pay-per-click advertising.  Using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising you can bid for placement in the search engines for the keyword phrases you know your customers are using when they are searching online.  The most commonly known PPC platform is Google’s Adwords program, although Microsoft and Yahoo also have well established PPC programs in place.  While top organically ranked listings are still the Holy Grail of search engine marketing, PPC advertising is a fine way to fill in the gaps of your organic listings as well as offering alternative ways to get in front of your audience.

Description of Click Fraud

The basic description of click fraud is when somebody intentionally generates multiple clicks on the same PPC ad – whether manually or by means of an automated process.  Since you only need to click a PPC ad one time to arrive at the landing page for the ad and each click to the ad costs a PPC advertiser money, these unnecessary extra clicks only serve a malicious purpose – to cost the PPC advertiser more money.  Some explanations of click fraud are obvious – your competitors are trying to exhaust your marketing budget, for instance.  But just like gibberish spam emails, other explanations can also exist.  The important thing to realize, is regardless of the explanation, if you are a PPC advertiser and you have click fraud perpetrated against your PPC campaign, you are being stolen from.

Click Fraud Protection

The search engines have click fraud protection methods in place to minimize click fraud.  The easiest method is recognizing multiple clicks coming from the same IP address.  In this case, these additional clicks from the same IP address are thrown out and not counted against your PPC budget.  This can also protect you from unintended click fraud where a legitimate user is comparison shopping and might reclick your ad multiple times during their session.

Do Search Engines Encourage Click Fraud?

Many speculate that the search engines encourage click fraud as they would stand to gain from the extra clicks as they get to bill their advertisers more money for all those bogus clicks.  I disagree with this opinion, as the search engines know that click fraud dilutes the effectiveness of a PPC campaign.  This in turn diminishes faith in the service and minimizes advertisers and their budgets.  A short term gain from click fraud revenue for the search engines would quickly lead to long term suffering as advertisers jump ship.  That being said, and with the protections in place from the search engines, it is a fact that click fraud still happens as scammers find new ways to beat the system.

How to Identify Click Fraud?

Becoming familiar with how to monitor your campaign statistics via your PPC management console is the first step.  If you or the person in charge of your campaign is not viewing the data, you won’t know what is going on.  Viewing the click through rates for each of you keyword phrases and how they change over time can indicate fraudulent activity.  If you have a keyword phrase that for the past year has averaged a 2.4% click through rate and now has suddenly spiked to 9.7%, although you have not recently optimized the campaign, this could be an obvious tip-off.  If you have conversion tracking in place for your campaign and the increase in click through rate actually leads to a decrease in ROI, this is another obvious clue.  Note that increasing your click-through rate is an end goal for your campaign, but usually happens when you are actively optimizing your campaign.

You can also use data that is external from your PPC management console, such as the statistics tracking tools that come with your hosting plan or Google Analytics.  Checking for multiple clicks from the same IP address or clicks from outside your target market area could indicate click fraud.  For example, if your are only marketing your campaign within a 25 mile radius of your zip code and you are getting an unnaturally large number of clicks from Korea, this could indicate click fraud.

What to Do if You are a Victim of Click Fraud?

The first step is to report it to the search engine your PPC campaign is with.  If the suspected click fraud is only occurring on certain keyword phrases in your campaign, you may want to consider pausing these keyword phrases in your campaign until you get things straightened out.  If it is a Google PPC campaign, you may find that the questionable clicks are originating from your ads on the Google Content Network.  Temporarily pausing ad placement on the Content Network until you can resolve the issue with Google is a good idea.  You don’t want to let click fraud kill your online marketing altogether, but tending to bleeding areas is crucial and can help revive your results.

Here is another scam that has been going around recently.

You get an email that appears to be coming from Google telling you your Adwords account needs to be updated or they will have to close it.  Usually, having to do with payment on your credit card not going through.  It first made rounds a few months back but I have been seeing it alot again.

If you get one of these emails – delete it.  If you have any doubts as to whether it is legit and you do have an Adwords account, go to your account the normal way you would – via bookmark or typing the URL in the address bar, for example – and NOT via the URL this scam email gives you.   After logging in to your actual account, you can check you account settings to verify all is running well.

Last month I touched on RSS feeds – what they are and how to use them (See RSS Feeds – How To Guide).  I wanted to expand upon RSS a bit more and how RSS will continue to play a bigger role in your online world. In this instance, I want to talk about how RSS gives you another avenue to promote your business.

If you are currently involved with Google Adwords (PPC, or Pay-Per-Click), you may be familiar with the Google Content Network.  This is where in addition to displaying on Google search result pages, you can have your Adwords display on other websites that are included in the Google network (AdSense).  Now Google Adwords can display within a RSS reader.  Get a feed about a particular RSS piece of information and you may see a related ad displayed near the posting – your results may vary, depending on what RSS feed reader you are using and where you’re getting the feed from.  Love it or hate it for a user’s point of view as it clutters your reader with ads, it is yet another tool to market your business.

It is a fairly new rollout from Google (earlier this year) and they just released some new functionality within the last week, but it is worth keeping in mind for your Adwords campaign.  As RSS feeds become more mainstream, its worth will likely continue to grow.

My prediction is that it will be viable for some but not everyone.  Just like the high impression/low click through rate of the Google Content Network, it will still take testing to determine if this option for Adwords nets you a good return.  But it’s good to have options.

This is a repost from my January 2008 eNewsletter:

“Picking the right keywords for your website does not necessarily mean what best describes your company and products/services or even what necessarily brings you the most traffic. Picking the right keywords means optimizing your website for the keywords and keyword phrases that will bring you the most customers to your site – customers that are ready and willing to spend money with you.

The first key is being specific. If you sell televisions, for example, using “television” or “tv” as a keyword will not likely do much for you. Instead, gather as much information on your televisions as possible to create more specific keywords. Do you only sell flat-screen televisions? How about plasma or LCD? Do you sell HD-ready televisions? Wide-screen? Used televisions? Once you have gathered all this data, you may find that a good keyword for your website is “used plasma hdtv” or “refurbished flat-screen tv”.

The keyword phrase of “used plasma hdtv” will be an easier keyword to optimize your website for than “television” and will bring customers who are specifically searching for what you are offering. Studies show that when someone is searching on a more specific keyword or keyword phrase they are closer to a buying decision than if they just use a general keyword term. Having ten visitors to your site that are ready to buy beats 100 visitors that are just looking around.

After you have picked your keywords, make sure your site is optimized for these keywords. Don’t try to optimize your entire site or home page for all your keywords. You might have 10 pages on your site, but only one geared towards used plasma HD televisions – optimize this page for that keyword. Yes, this means having separate keywords for different pages on your site as opposed to a blanket list of keywords for your site as a whole. It’s a bit more work, but the results will be worth it.

After your site is live, review what keywords are working and which are not. View the traffic stats provided by your hosting company to see which keyword terms visitors are typing into search engines to get to your site. If certain product or service pages are not getting much traffic, make improvements to the keyword optimization or brainstorm on new keywords that you are not using yet. Find out your rankings for your keywords and track their movement on a monthly basis. If you have a top ranking for a keyword, but little to no traffic to your site for that keyword, then it is pretty safe to determine that a different keyword or keywords are needed to capture the attention of potential customers.

By constantly analyzing your keywords performance you will be able to make the needed changes to maximize potential customers to your website.”

This is a repost from my October 2007 eNewsletter:

“If you are trying to maximize your results in the search engines one of the first things to review is the relevancy of your website content in relation to the keywords you wish to rank well for. If you are selling lemon scented baby powder on your website, talk about lemon scented baby powder on your website – don’t just mention the product, explain what it is, why it is important to buy, how to use it and any other information that can show your potential customers (and the search engines) that you are an expert on lemon scented baby powder. The more valuable and thorough your information the more likely you will have of increasing your ranking in the search engines.

This technique applies to Google Adword (Pay-Per-Click / Sponsored Links) campaigns too where you bid for placement on a search result page for a keyword. If Google sees your landing page is more relevant than a competing bidder for the same keyword, you could potential pay less money than your competitor for that keyword, while still getting a higher listing! Why? Because Google knows that relevant search results keep users coming back for future searches so they reward advertisers who help provide the most relevant content.

How relevant is your website to its keyword terms? We can help you determine that with our NetSource Search Engine Quality Score Report. This report will give you a break down of your website’s search engine relevancy, quality of inbound and outbound links, potential problem areas and recommendations for how to improve your search engine results. The report is only $150 and can be applied to the setup of new search engine marketing plans. Call me at 1-800-709-3240 or (352) 732-7700 for more details.”