| Top Web Hosting Provider of The Month: |
 |
| Visit Bluehost.com | Read Bluehost Review |
|
|
| >> Web Hosting Geeks // Web Hosting Articles // PPC Advertising |
|
|
 |
Is Click Fraud Really a Problem?
Click fraud is currently a major topic in online advertising. Many argue that it presents a threat to the stability and viability of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, the key revenue generator for both Google and Overture. In actuality, click fraud is not a significant issue at all. Click fraud occurs when ads are clicked for reasons other than a genuine interest in learning more about the product or service advertised. Click fraud occurs in two forms. In one instance, fraud arises from competitors trying to sabotage each other. One competitor clicks on the ads of another just to drain the budget of that company. The other instance occurs when webmasters (or people associated with the webmaster) repeatedly click Google AdSense ads (which are syndications of others' ads) on their own web pages in order to generate more revenue. While both Overture and Google have developed sophisticated technologies to detect click fraud, their systems are, and may never be, foolproof. The real question is how much does click fraud actually damage the PPC industry? Gross fraud, i.e., when one person or technology consistently and repeatedly clicks on an ad, aside, which Overture and Google can easily detect, we believe that click fraud has no real impact on the industry. The following explains why. Efficient market theory says that it is impossible to "beat a market" because prices already incorporate and reflect all relevant information. As the PPC industry has matured, efficiency has begun to take root. That is, the price of each keyword has been driven up to the point where it reflects the highest price an advertiser is willing to pay for a click. For instance, a book retailer may pay $1.00 per click based on internal metrics. These metrics dictate, for example, that on average 30% of clickers purchase a book and the average profit per sale is $4.00. So, for every 100 clicks ($100 cost), they make 30 sales ($120 revenue) and generate a $20.00 (20%) profit. Note that years ago, the same retailer may have been able to pay only $0.50 per click, but as the market matured and more retailers began advertising, competitive bidding forced the price up to $1.00 where the highest return the most advertisers can make is 20%. The key point is that click fraud is already taken into effect when advertisers select the highest amount they will bid. For instance, there is no difference whether an advertiser pays $0.83/click for 121 clicks with 21 being fraudulent, or $1.00/click for 100 clicks when there is absolutely no fraud. In either case, the advertiser pays $100 and generates a profit of $20, and Overture and/or Google make $100. What changes is the advertiser's yield (e.g., the percent of clickers who purchased the book) which in turn effects their highest bid price. That is, with fraud, 30 out of 121 clickers (24.8%) purchased the book, and without fraud 30 out of 100 clickers (30%) purchased it. Without fraud, the bid price in an efficient market will rise from $0.83 to $1.00. In summary, online advertisers must focus on analyzing and improving their internal metrics (e.g., conversions) and not worry about click fraud as it is already incorporated into keyword bid prices. Hopefully, the frivolous lawsuits and refund requests spawned by apparent click fraud will end as those in the industry recognize this undeniable fact. About The Author: Contact:
MORE RESOURCES:
Enquisite Selects Aster Data to Scale Its Worldwide Search Data Network - Earthtimes (press release)
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
How To Write Little Tiny AdWords Ads That Bring Giant-Sized Profits It seems to be a phenomenon. You try Google AdWords Select, your ad gets "disapproved" by the powers that be at Google, you count your losses and give up. 3 Strategies to Profit When Click Prices Increase (Part 3 of 3 Series) What is Average Customer Lifetime Value?Traditional business philosophy is that "it is often more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to generate repeat sales from existing ones and that existing sales are more profitable due to the reduced marketing expense." This strategy is very effective for offsetting the affects of rising pay-per-click costs. Pay Per Click Advertising For Home Business Owners The biggest stumbling block for most home business owners is marketing their business. Most will start at free to post FFA pages and safelists. What You Need To Know About Googles New AdWords Affiliate Policy A lot of affiliates are selling other people's products with AdWords. This has been known as easy money, since no website is required. Is Pay Per Click your Best Marketing Bet? You may already have heard of this method to get people to your web site. From my point of view and experience it turns out to be expensive and you have to write the ads yourself, pay for them, and change and maintain them to be the correct ones to work and be the right price in competition with many others. Google Adwords: Here is Why It Can Explode Your Business! The beauty of Google Adwords set up is its simplicity. Google programmers seem to be a close follower of the maxim taught by Edward Debono when it comes to simplicity. Buying Your Way to the Top with Pay Per Click Advertising Imagine if you could advertise ONLY to people who have actually expressed an interest in doing business with you? That's basically what happens whenever a prospective customer or client types a phrase into a search engine that's relevant to your business. But how do search engines decide which sites are worthy of top placement in their search results? It turns out that some of the results are ranked by the search engine's computers while others are simply paid advertisements from companies willing to buy their way to the top using Pay Per Click Advertising. Optimize Your Pay Per Click Ads - 3 Quick Tips Running a pay per click campaign can be a valuable, fast source of online sales - but it can also cost you a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing. Many pay per click newbies sign up with a ppc search engine and end up spending lots of money very fast - without making a single sale. Five Steps to Profit from Google Adwords Although I was marketing online since 1997 and was making money on the Internet, as soon as I discovered the famous GoogleCash ebook I was instantly hooked. It seemed so easy to profit from Google Adwords: just join an affiliate program, promote it on Google Adwords pay per click (ppc) search engine starting from only five dollars, and watch your profits soar. ClickBank Link Theft: Is It Really That Bad? If you have visited any of the affiliate-related websites or read any of the various ebooks about affiliate marketing, you've almost certainly seen references to the thorny subject of link theft. Indeed, so contentious is this issue that it is frequently discussed in forums and a whole arsenal of third party weapons has evolved to help defeat it. When Adsense Makes No Sense: Knowing When Not To Use The Google Adsense Pay-Per-Click Program Google's AdSense program is a proven money-maker that has enriched the pockets of many website owners. Unlike many pay-per-click systems, the AdSense program has a large pool of advertisements to draw from -- the ads come from Google's AdWords program, which you can think of as the flipside of AdSense -- which almost guarantees that AdSense can find relevant advertisements to display alongside a site's content. Adsense, Boost Your Payout 400%, No Really How?Dead easy.I implemented this tactic myself yesterday on one of my sites and my CTR has gone up 300% and it hasn't been 24hrs yet. 10 Steps For Fighting Click Fraud Pay-Per click fraud dates back even from the time when Overture was still Goto.com. Keywords, How to Find Them, and Use Them Effectively To be a successful affiliate marketer takes a ton of work. You probably know this by now. Google Adwords: Higher Traffic and Sales in 2 Hours or Less! There are various ways to purchase highly targeted advertising at very low prices. Google AdWords is one simple and quick way to to do this. How to Save Money on the Adwords Network Over the years I have had many accounts with Adwords, spending a small fortune with the Adwords service. So naturally I have picked up many cost saving tricks. AdSense - 7 Keys To Empire? There's a lot of buzz around about how you can make a quick and easy fortune using this AdSense course or that tool or this book.And they show you their incomes from AdSense too (though not necessarily THIS month). Independent Search Engine & Directory Network (ISEDN) - Breaking News! Watch out for a shift in the pay-per-click (PPC) industry, happening right now! This shift is finally going to give smaller search engines and directories the ability to tap into the PPC market, currently monopolized by the big guns online (Google, Yahoo & MSN). They will attain this lofty goal by banding together and delivering paid ad placements on a mass community scale for a fraction of the cost. Understanding Google AdSense Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content relevant advertisements on web pages. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral. Pay Per Click Advertising and Article Marketing Compared At first glance, Pay Per Click advertising seems to be the fastest way to send targeted website traffic to your websites online. You choose some keywords and add your website's url and you are done.
|
|
|
|
|
| © 2004 - 2008 "Web Hosting Geeks" | Web Hosting Reviews | Customer Reviews | RealMetrics Reviews | Hosting Articles | Directory | Partners | Contacts Over 7000 articles: web hosting, web development, domain names, ecommerce, web design, site promotion, ppc advertising, seo, site promotion and many others. Web hosting reviews, ratings and awards are not based on any incentives or commissions. Names and trademarks are the properties of their respective owners. A direct link to Web Hosting Geeks (http://webhostinggeeks.com) must be provided in order to use any of the above information. Contact us for more info. Partners: Hosts by speed, Cheap Website Hosting, Free Website Hosting, Cheap Web Hosting, Top 10 Web Hosts, Top 10 Web Hosting Deals, Best Website Hosting, Free Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, Adult Web Hosting, Web Hosting Discussions, Dedicated Server Reviews, Best Web Hosting, Web Hosting Discounts, HostProfessor.com, rsuog, halyava, PHP Website Hosting Services, Web Hosting Reviews, Hosting Uptime, Best Web Hosting Reviews, Cheap Webhosting, Web Hosting, Flash Templates, CMS Templates, Web Hosting Reviews, Website Hosting Reviews, Web Hosting Providers, Best Web Hosting, Top Web Hosting, RSUOG Web Hosting |