Google Pay Per Click advertising works great as long as you know what you are doing. It’s great for getting instant traffic and sales, but can also drain your marketing budget if you don’t be careful. If you are already using PPC for online advertising or thinking of doing so in the future, you may find the topics discussed in this article interesting.
Click Fraud
Click fraud is when someone clicks on sponsored links for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. An example might be where Company A has a Pay-Per-Click campaign running with a maximum budget of $200 per month. A competitor, Company B has a similar campaign running with the same budget. Company B has an employee spend time doing searches and clicking on Company A’s ads so that their daily budget is depleted and therefore there is less competition for Company B’s Ads. They could also set up an automated script to do the same thing. Click fraud is the subject of a lot of controversy and increasing litigation. Last week, Click Forensics released industry pay-per-click fraud figures for the first quarter 2009. Among their findings:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 13.8 percent for the first quarter of this year; down from 17.1 percent during Q4 2008 and from 16.3 percent rate reported for the first quarter of 2008.
- Click fraud traffic from new malicious scripted programs increased in Q1 2009.
Although the figures show that rate of click fraud is decreasing, it is still an obvious problem. As an advertiser, you should be conscious of the impact of click fraud
on your business, and should take steps to combat it. However,
remember that you will never eliminate it completely.One way to deal with click fraud is to use tracking mechanisms to try to catch click
fraud. For example, you could use a script that you would gather data
on visitors from PPC search engines (data might include IP address,
number of times they clicked on the ad, and time they spent on the
site) and use that data to pick out suspicious visitors. You can then
submit the data to the search engine and request a refund on the
traffic. There is software available to do this and you could do a search on Google (search for 'combat click fraud') to find the right one for you.
Advertisement not always visible
Have you noticed that when you do a search for your search terms in Google, sometimes your ad appears and sometimes it doesn’t. This is related to your budget and how many competitors there are for this search term. Firstly, if you have a budget of $10 per day, Google will take this budget into account and try to spread your ad’s visibility over the full day. If your daily budget is used up by clicks early in the day, then your ad may not appear for the rest of the day. Secondly, if there are a lot of websites registered for the same search terms and all with similar budgets and bid prices, Google will shuffle these website around to give each one the same exposure meaning yours may not show each time.
Content Network
When you set up a new campaign, the Content Network option defaults to On. This may not be something you want and you may not realise how much a difference it can make to your campaign. The Content Network option means that your ads are eligible to appear on sites containing content relevant to your ad. There is a lot of talk online in forums and blogs about the downfalls of having this switched on ie it has been known to use up your daily budget but with poor results. We recommend that when you start your campaign, switch it off –choose "edit campaign settings" and un-tick content network.. After you have a campaign running profitably on the search network ie you’re happy with your keywords and landing page, then test the content network.. Go back into your "edit campaign settings" and switch the content network.to On but also put a check mark in "content bids" which allows you to set separate prices for content network. Once you save your settings you can put in a separate bid. Then let it run for a day or two and see what position you are getting, if you are receiving any clicks and if these clicks are turning to leads.
We at Organise Internet specialise in Natural or Organic Search Engine. Read this article to learn more about the difference between the two types of SEO.
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