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On June 24, 2005, a lawsuit was filed against Google for alleged click fraud on the Adwords pay-per-click program. The Plaintiff, Click Defense, claims Google failed to enact appropriate measures to guard against fraudulent clicks resulting in unwarranted marketing fees. Click Defense claims it has lost over $5 million to click fraud.

Click Fraud

“Click fraud” is a term with a unique meaning on the Internet. It refers to the deliberate clicking of pay-per-click advertisements by users that have no intent of actually making a purchase. It is common knowledge that unethical companies will set up click centers oversees where individuals are paid nominal wages to click on certain ads. Alternatively, companies will use programs called “click bots” that automatically search out ads and do the same thing. The end result, of course, is a bevy of clicks that drain advertising budgets.

Google claims it takes appropriate precautionary measures. This claim, however, is often met with a snicker since the sole source of revenues for Google is advertising. This causes an inherent conflict of interest since Google needs to maximize clicks to generate revenues. As a publicly traded company, Google is under pressure to continually show increased profits. Taking all of this into account, one must wonder how hard Google works to limit fraudulent clicks. If you have used the “content search” aspect of Google Adwords, the incredible poor conversion rates certainly must raise doubts in your mind.

Click Fraud Percentages

Neither Google, Overture nor any other search engine has been willing to publish click fraud rates for their paid advertising program. Hints have been provided regarding a rate of 20 percent. Active advertisers know, however, the percentages can be much higher depending on the competitiveness of the keywords in question. Click Defense, the Plaintiff in the lawsuit, is claiming a click fraud rate of 38 percent.

Will This Impact PPC?

The lawsuit against Google was inevitable. Every site using Adwords is aware of the problem with click fraud. Frankly, it is a problem with every pay-per-click search engine although our experience has been better with Overture.

So, will this lawsuit force the search engines to clean up their act? It’s hard to say, but there should be one definite benefit. As part of the lawsuit, Google may be forced to reveal the true click fraud percentages occurring in Adwords. If Google moves to quickly settle the case, you should take it as an indication it wants to keep the rates confidential. This, of course, will mean the click fraud percentages are high.

You should watch the progress of this lawsuit if you use pay-per-click search engines to promote your site. Some very interesting information should be revealed. Regardless of the outcome, click fraud is just another reason to pursue search engine optimization strategies.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.

The biggest stumbling block for most home business owners is marketing their business. Most will start at free to post FFA pages and safelists. Most free advertising will never be seen by anyone and as a result business owners get discouraged and quit.

Pay Per Click search engines are one of the most effective tools you can use to bring quick targeted traffic to your site. With pay-per-click search engines, you pay every time a visitor clicks on your link, anything from a few cents to a few dollars. Lets say you have a site that sells camping gear and you want to rank in the top ten in the search engines for the term camping gear. To be ranked in one of the top ten spots in the free search engines, you’d probably be looking at several months’ minimum, if ever. But in the pay-per-click search engine you can grab a top ten spot anytime you want. That’s because all you have to do is see how much the person who has the position you want is paying per click, and simply outbid them by paying one penny more. Then when your potential customer searches for the term camping gear your link will show up as one of the top 10 listings on the search results page. Each time someone clicks on your link, you’ll pay however much you have bid for that position.

The advantages of bidding on keywords with pay per-clicks are that you get highly targeted advertising, because you only pay when someone actually clicks through to your site. Your listing get posted quickly and you can start profiting from increased traffic almost immediately. In order to be in one of the top ten positions, all you have to do is outbid your competitors, which is only a matter of a penny more per click.

Done right, pay-per-click advertising can be very profitable and to help you ensure your campaigns are profitable avoid keywords that are too general. General keywords will attract a lot of traffic but drive up the cost of your pay per click campaign and convert very few visitors to sales because general search terms aren’t specific enough or in very high demand. Try using keyword phrases, two or three words that pertain to your business. Use any search term suggestion tool and put in your keyword. The results will show your term, how many times it has been searched and also show many different variations. Try to pick one that is more specific to what you’re trying to advertise using two or three words. That will lower you’re cost and be more targeted. The money you save by doing this will enable you to bid on more keywords and you can still get the same exposure without competing for the expensive terms.

About The Author

Kevin O’Hara

President and owner http://www.buzzseek.com.

kevin54321@optonline.net

Once you venture into the world of Pay Per Click advertising, you’ll soon discover that the marketplace is sharply divided between tier 1 Search Engines (Google and Overture), and everyone else. While it’s difficult to imagine a comprehensive, successful Pay Per Click Advertising campaign that doesn’t include the major players, companies that limit themselves to Google and Overture may be missing out on profitable traffic.

Defining Tier 1 And Tier 2 Search Engines:

Two things separate Google and Overture from the rest of the Pay Per Click Search Engines. The big players deliver more traffic, and the quality of the clicks is often better. Simply put, if you advertise on Google and Overture your ad will be seen by more people, and these people are more likely going to buy from you. This is why its difficult to ignore the big players when crafting your Pay Per Click Advertising strategy. However, if you’re willing to put in the effort, you’ll often discover it’s the smaller, lesser known, Search Engines that ultimately deliver the most profitable traffic to your site.

The Downside Of Being Big:

Ironically, the same factors that make Google and Overture essential to any Pay Per Click Advertising campaign are also the reasons it’s becoming increasingly difficult for small and medium size companies to generate profitable traffic from the top tier Search Engines.

Nearly every company doing Pay Per Click Advertising is using Google and Overture, meaning you’re competing against virtually every company remotely connected with your industry for your keywords. As competition for your keywords increases your prices rise, and your profits fall. Both Google and Overture have hundreds of thousands of advertisers, causing keywords in some competitive industries to sell for over $10.00 per click! As this trend continues small and medium size companies will be forced to explore alternative sources of traffic if they hope to maintain their profit margins on their Pay Per Click Advertising campaigns.

The other downside of working with the big Search Engines is they tend to focus their customer support resources on their big customers. This can make it difficult for smaller companies to get help optimizing their campaigns, generating lists of keywords or creating compelling ad copy.

Thankfully, there are several smaller Search Engines who can fill the void by delivering high quality Search traffic at an affordable price.

The Best Of The Rest:

Once you expand your horizons beyond Google and Overture, and begin running tests on some smaller Search Engines, you’ll find wide discrepancies in traffic quality and volume, software functionality and customer support. When deciding which smaller Search Engines to work with we recommend focusing on traffic quality as the key criteria. If your clicks convert into customers, it’s easier to put up with the challenges that come with working with the smaller Search Engines.

Lycos AdBuyer consistently delivers high quality traffic, but you may have difficulty generating the volume you need for some of your keywords. Their customer support is top notch, but their software isn’t as user friendly as Google or Overture’s. We recommend Lycos as a good source of incremental Search traffic at competitive rates.

FindWhat.Com does a better job generating traffic volume (they are the third largest Pay Per Click Search Engine), and their overall traffic quality is decent. They do a good job supporting their customers, but their software lacks some key features to help users easily manage their campaigns, and track the ROI for each ad and keyword. We highly recommend testing FindWhat. They are the largest of the second tier players, and can be an important contributor to the success of your Pay Per Click Advertising strategy.

Enhance Interactive and Search123 are two other smaller Search Engines we recommend based on a combination of traffic volume and quality. Both are still building their networks, and continually improving their software. You can still find good bargains for your keywords on these Search Engines as they are still relatively unknown.

Summary:

In todays vast World Wide Web your potential customers could be searching for your products on hundreds of different sites. In a perfect world you would serve up an ad whenever, and wherever somebody was looking for what you sell. Using a combination of Google, Overture, and as many smaller Search Engines as you can test, you will increase the chances that your ad will be there when your prospects are ready to buy.

Smaller Search Engines generally offer cheaper cost per clicks, and better customer support than Google and Overture. As with many aspects of Pay Per Click Advertising, the only way to tell if these smaller Engines will work for you is to give them a test. A small investment in your time and money may ultimately uncover a great new source of profitable traffic, and improve the overall metrics of your Pay Per Click Advertising campaigns.

February 23, 2005

Expert in all aspects of online advertising with a particular emphasis in Pay Per Click Advertising. Over seven years of experience directing advertising sales efforts at a top 10 Media Metrix property, and the creator of http://www.pay-per-click-advertising-guide.com

If you have multiple sites or multiple directories in your site for different subjects and you have placed Adsense codes in your site, I am sure you would like to know: (a) from which site or directory you are earning the most / least, (b) which Adsense ads are being clicked and (c) from which page?

CREATE CHANNELS FOR EACH SITE

To get separate stats for each site / section / directory / page with Adsense, you need to create channels for each one. Create a channel with a relevant name and generate a code for that channel. Paste that particular Adsense code to the concerned pages / sites.

GET CHANNEL STATS IN REAL TIME

Google now provides Channel Data in real time. Earlier, it used to provide data for ‘2 days before’. Follow the procedure mentioned below :

1. From ‘Date Range’ drop down menu, select ‘today’.

2. Check the radio button : Group data by ‘Channel’.

3. On the right hand panel, check the radio button ‘Channel data’.

4. Click on ‘Select ALL’ at the bottom of channel list.

5. Click on ‘Display Report’.

Now you get the seggregated report for clicks generated for each channel.

WHICH ADS ARE BEING CLICKED AND FROM WHICH PAGE?

It is very important to know that which pages / sites are generating good Adsense revenue and which are not. We can work upon those poorly performing pages. If we can get to know about which ads are being clicked, that would make us feel more informed for many obvious reasons.

Currently Google does not provide this data. But you can still get it from a very nice and detailed free web stat service, Add Free Stats.

Add Free Stats provides a very detailed web stats which satisfies most webmasters. You may open a free account at : http://www5.addfreestats.com, get the code and paste it at the bottom of each of your pages.

Make sure that in ‘Your Account’ section you mark ‘Yes’ for ‘Exit link tracking’.

Now check your stats at Add Free Stats, and you will find a “A” icon beside the visitors’ ip. That means that visitor has clicked on an Adsense code. Place your mouse over the icon, and you can see which ad has been clicked.

You can also generate a separate report of pages that have generated Adsense click. Select ‘Exit Links/Adsense’ from the drop down menu marked as ‘Pages’. Here you get a folder icon named Adsense, the number of Adsense clicks etc. Click on the Adsense folder icon and you get the number of Adsense clicks on each page and which ads are clicked on that page. Click on the ‘hour glass’ icon and you get the CTR, PV too for each page.

I am no way connected to Add Free Stats. I am just a happy user. Any webmaster working seriously towards Adsense earning, must have this tool.

Subhendu Sen is the owner and webmaster of A Low-Cost Web Host: http://www.IndHosts.Net/hosting.html and is in the business of web hosting since 1998. He also owns other sites of interest : http://www.TheWebContent.com – An Article Directory and http://www.PopAccount.com – A Free Email Address Directory

When doing Pay Per Click Advertising you’ll often see “Bid Gaps” emerge among the cost per clicks of the keywords you’re bidding on. For example, the top three positions for the keyword “Mortgage” may be listed as:

Position # 1 $1.00
Position # 2 $.79
Position # 3 $.78

In this example the advertiser in the #1 position is overpaying for their traffic. They could lower their bid to $.80 and still maintain their #1 position, while saving $.20 on each click.

Why Bid Gaps Appear:

Often times advertisers in the top position want to put distance between themselves and their competition to avoid having to check each day to see if they’re still in the #1 position. Sometimes when companies upload keywords into their Pay Per Click Advertising program they set all their bids to the same amount, regardless of where their competitors have set their bids.

The most common reason why some PPC advertisers create “Bid Gaps” and overpay for their clicks is they’re not aware of the tools available from third party vendors, or the PPC Search Engines themselves to avoid these gaps.

Eliminating “Bid Gaps”:

Some Search Engines like Google automatically eliminate “Bid Gaps” by ranking ads using a combination of click through rate, and the maximum bid established by the advertiser. Google claims this allows them to offer advertisers the best ranking on the page at the lowest cost, while guaranteeing the ads they display are relevant to the keywords users are searching on. Google’s system involves some trust on the part of the advertiser, since it’s impossible to tell what you’re competitors are bidding. If your competitor has done a good job optimizing their ad copy to achieve a high click through rate, their ad could appear above yours, even if you’re paying a higher cost per click.

Other Pay Per Click Search Engines like FindWhat.Com offer an optional ‘AutoBid” feature. This feature allows you to specify the maximum you would be willing to pay per click for each keyword, and the system will automatically adjust your bid to $.01 more than the next highest bidder. If your competitor raises their bid the system will continue adjusting your bid until it reaches you maximum bid.

Example:

Current bid for the #1 position: $.50
Maximum bid that you specify using “AutoBid” $1.00
The amount the system will set your bid: $.51

It’s important to note that the cost per click may never reach your maximum bid. We highly recommend using automated bidding features whenever possible. These tools allow you to maintain premium positioning for your ads at the lowest possible costs while saving you time from having to check where your ad is ranked every day, and manually adjusting your bids.

In addition to the tools offered by the PPC Search Engines to eliminate “Bid Gaps”, there are several third party Bid Management applications that will do the trick. Atlas OnePoint offers a sophisticated Bid Management tool to effectively manage your bidding strategy across 40 different Pay Per Click Search Engines and shopping comparison sites. BidRank is another tool we recommend for optimizing keyword bids, and avoiding “Bid Gaps”.

How You Can Profit From “Bid Gaps”:

While creating “Bid Gaps” for your own keywords can be a costly mistake, you can often improve the metrics of your Pay Per Click Advertising program by taking advantage of gaps that appear in the bidding strategy of your competition.

Example:

Position # 1 $1.00
Position # 2 $ .79
Position # 3 $. 78

A “Bid Gap” has appeared between the #1 and the # 2 positions. You can either pay $1.01 to lock in the #1 position, or bid $.80 for the # 2 slot. Given these alternatives it may make more sense to opt for the # 2 position. The slight decline in traffic from slipping to the #2 spot may be more than compensated by the improved ROI due to the lower cost per click.

If you want to play hardball with your competitors by driving their cost per clicks higher, while locking in good positioning for your ads at a lower cost, you can manipulate the ‘Auto Bidding” tools to your advantage.

Example:

Position # 1 $1.00
Position # 2 $. 79
Position # 3 $. 78

In this example, if you used any of the “AutoBid” features offered by many of the Search Engines and set your maximum bid to $.99 ($.01 less than your competitor in the #1 position), the system would put you in the # 2 position at $.80 ($.01 more than the next highest bid), while your competitor would still have to pay $1.00 for the # 1 slot (since the system would consider your $.99 maximum bid to be the next highest bid, and adjust your competitor’s bid to be $.01 more). Software company Pay Per Click Management offers a “CompetitionBuster” feature specifically designed to take advantage of your competition’s “Bid Gaps”.

We don’t necessarily endorse this approach, but the Pay Per Click Advertising game isn’t for the faint of heart. You need to have a well thought out bidding strategy so you don’t overpay for your clicks, while still getting the traffic volume you need to reach your goals.

The Pros And Cons Of “Bid Gaps” February 16, 2005

Stan Hauser is a leading expert on effective Pay Per Click Advertising strategies, and creator of http://www.pay-per-click-advertising-guide.com

On Friday, July 15th all Google advertisers got the email message entitled “Google AdWords(TM) Announcement: Keyword Evaluation Changes”. Now, I don’t know about you, but whenever I get a message from Google concerning Adwords, everything else seems to take a backseat.

So we’ve decided to give you a heads up on what you can be expecting in the future, how you can expect these new changes to effect your advertising efforts, and what you should be doing to make sure that you can compete after they’ve been implemented.

First, here is a brief summary of the changes so you understand what exactly is going on:

1. Keywords will simply be active or inactive, instead of Normal, in trial, on hold, disabled.

2. There will be a minimum bid for each of your keywords based on the keyword’s Quality Score which, in turn, will be based on your ad’s click-through rate. The higher-relevant, more targeted, ads will have higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bid amounts. The less-relevant and less-targeted keywords and ads will have higher minimum bids. Now the difference from Google’s old way of doing things is that you can now activate your keywords no matter what. Before, it was up to Google. They would simply place your keywords on hold, and you didn’t have a choice, but try to optimize your ad. Now, you can get that keyword to run, regardless of its quality score?but you’ll have to pay a much higher price per click.

What does all of this mean for the advertiser? Well, it means a few things, and it would be foolish to say that these changes were all good. They are definitely all good for Google, and that is to be expected.

1. Google says that they believe these changes will result in higher-quality ads. Maybe this is true, and maybe it’s not. What is true is that the educated advertisers will save money under the new rules. People that know how to group ads and get higher CTR’s will have to pay less for the same ad rank as those advertisers that do not know such techniques. That’s a good thing for small advertisers who spend time organizing their Adword accounts.

2. But? on the flip side, it also means that big advertisers with big budgets can now come in and write ineffective ads and get good placement. Notice above, we didn’t say that this change was all necessarily good for small advertisers. What is true is that small advertisers will have to become more educated to compete. Big advertisers care about branding. They want to have the number 1 ad slot, and most of the time, they don’t really care what it costs. Now, in the old days, if their ad wasn’t getting clicks, the ad simply wouldn’t get shown (good for the small advertiser). But now, they can just pay more to have their ad shown. This was a good move by Google to get a lot more money in their pocket.

3. Conversion rate becomes the key. If your site converts, you can afford to pay more per click, in turn, you can compete. If your site doesn’t convert, you’ll be eliminated by the big advertisers and/or the smart advertisers. That’s the bottom line. The first step is not getting the traffic to your site like so many teach. But conversely, it’s getting your site in a position to support the clicks.

Here are 3 action steps you can work on to make sure that you will be competing in the Adwords game for some time to come. We realize that each of these steps can be broken down into months of work, but don’t let yourself get caught up in too many details. Just focus on these three things before you start getting too in depth with changing your Adwords accounts around, give each of them a quick rehaul, and make sure you know your numbers.

1. You need to get educated and learn the system. Grouping keywords, writing good ads, keyword selection, it’s all equally important and will play a large role in the future of your Adwords campaign.

2. You’ll also need to get your site converting well enough to support these clicks. Otherwise you’ll lose money very quickly. The formula is [number of sales made / visitors to your site]. On the internet you should realistically be aiming for about 1%.

3. Finally, you need to determine the visitor value of your site. This will tell you how much you can afford to bid on clicks. The formula is [dollars made by your site / visitors to your site]. Plan on bidding about 50% of your site’s visitor value.

So, in summary, if you want to compete in the Adwords marketplace in the future, you need to take action, actively monitor your account, and know your numbers. Your goal is to run a profitable business. If you focus on the three action steps above you’ll know your place in the market, you’ll be ready to compete, and you’ll make money using the new Adwords system.

John Rooney and David Nevogt are well known ebook authors that focus on internet-based niche selling. If you have a website that is not performing or you want to learn how to frame a profitable business around an online product, subscribe to the newsletter at http://www.ebooksaleskit.com

These are simply advertisements related, in theory and often practice, to the content of a page.

While contextual ads. can be engineered by you, the most common type is Google adsense. Google adsense is probably the easiest to install, and demands very little of your time.

A publishing account is opened, and after approval, you will have access to the code that makes it all happen.

This code is written in JavaScript, a scripting language that is interpreted by your browser, which is its business, incidentally. Your publishing i.d. is automatically built into the code that they supply. This is simply for payment purposes.

After that, you just need to copy it and paste it into the page, at the editing stage.

The position that your contextual ads. appear in, when viewed through a browser is up to you, though some S.E.O.’s have theories on the optimum position. Their concerns centres around placing such code out of the way, more so than placing it in an area of maximum visual prominence, but that is a debate for another day.

If a page is optimised, in S.E.O. speak, your contextual ads, will generally reflect the content. In other words, an optimised page having optimised keywords relating to EGGS, will produce ads about or relating to EGGS.

Why?

It is a targeting strategy. A visitor wishing for information on that four-lettered E word would most likely have a thirst for further information. Should that be the case, a potential sale could be made. This theory of targeting is the fundamental basis of all functional advertisements.

In the absence of an optimised page, Google Adsense must make it’s own assessment of what is going on, and a contextual ad is returned on that. Science, being what it is, must be throughout for maximum benefit and it is hardly the fault of Google if true reflection or context, doesn’t happen.

Public Service Ads. can also be ran in, where nothing more suitable is found from the advertisers, and any commercial benefit is theirs. These ads. are mainly donation related, but not exclusively and are also automatically generated.

Having said that, in a lot of cases the publisher doesn’t really care and is happy with some automatic ads., rather than none. Incidentally, these ads. can be coloured and formatted to suit the general theme of your site.

In other cases, contextual ads. can make a pleasant and subtle distraction to a page that is mainly dedicated to text.

Any income that may be generated by contextual ads. is really down to your S.E.O. ability, the ability of your S.E.O., curiosity of the visitor, the number of them, and any proportional advantages that the number of pages may bring.

Seamus Dolly and an example of “ad. alignment” are at http://www.CountControl.com/contextualads.html

Google AdSense is a great way for webmasters to monetize their websites. While many webmasters are struggling hard to earn $3 – $10 per day, some ‘genius’ webmasters have already enjoyed $30, $100, and even $300 a day from AdSense ads on their websites. How are these ‘genius’ webmasters differ from their counterparts? They think different! They think out of the box!

Let me share with you some tips which has been responsible in boosting my AdSense profits by 700%. Here are 5 of them, and if you follow these steps, I’m sure you’ll see a difference in your AdSense income.

Here are the tips:

1- I concentrate on 1 format of AdSense ad, which is the Large Rectangle (336×280). This format has been proven to work with me in resulting high click-through rates (CTR). Why this format? Because the ads look like normal web links, and people are trained to click on these types of links.

2- I create custom palette for my ads. I choose white as the color for the border and background. This is because, all of my pages have white background. The idea is to make the AdSense ads look like they are a part of my web pages.

3- Previously, I put all my AdSense ads at the bottom of my pages. One day, I moved those ads to the top of the page. The result surprised me. My earning increased! Since then, I don’t hide my AdSense ads anymore!

4- I maintain some links to other relevant websites, and I put my AdSense ads at the top of the links, so that my visitors see them first.

5- I automate the insertion of AdSense code into my webpages using SSI (server side included). You’ll need to ask your web administrator whether your server supports SSI or not. Here’s how to do it. You just put the AdSense code in a text file, save it as ‘adsense.txt’, and upload it to the root directory of your web server. Next, call the code on other pages using SSI.

This trick is really a time saver especially for those who use automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

Here’s a tool I use to generate thousands of pages on my website within seconds: http://www.adsense-insider-secrets.com/page-generator.htm

Try these tips today, and I guarantee your AdSense earnings will improve. For more tips, you can visit my site at: http://www.adsense-insider-secrets.com

Mohd Fairuz maintains a website called AdSense Insider Secrets. On his site, he shares with his visitors free tips, secrets & strategies how he managed to boost his Google AdSense earnings by 700%. Go to his website, and get the tips, free of charge at: http://www.adsense-insider-secrets.com

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