| LED Digest 1858: Monitoring PPC Fraudulent Clicks |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................. August 19, 2004 Issue #1858 ................................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= <Moderator Comment> ~ Honeymoon Time... Welcome Veronica! --== Natural Search ==-- ~ Sarah Hayes "With reference to PPC fraud, I have just signed up with a service called Who's Clicking Who..." --== The Oldest of the Old School? ==-- ~ Neil Parker "One of the first corporate websites was Digital's dec.com, started in 1993." ~ Brad Waller "I used to hack into accounts at Caltech back when I was in high school (mostly to play Zork)..." --== The Human Touch ==-- ~ Mekhong Kurt "People like a personal voice - even when they strongly disagree with the writer's position." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Custom URL Error Pages for Browsers? ==-- ~ Tom Aman ===== CONTINUING ================================= <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, I'm off on a tour of Scotland and parts of Germany for my honeymoon. I'm incredibly excited to be exploring new territory, seeing amazing things and meeting interesting people. I love to travel (well, not the actual act itself... but once I'm there -- hoo-boy!) and now I've got the honeymoon as my excuse! While I'm gone, the LED will be under the capable, experienced and professional hands of Veronica Yuill. You may remember her from I-Design, a list she moderated for several years. Veronica has always been great to work with. She's top-class and knows the business inside and out. I think the timing of this is perfect. After doing the LED for so long, there's a tendency for things to get stale. New energy, approaches and perspectives help to broaden the quality of the list and I think you'll experience a renewal of sorts with Veronica at the helm. I'll see you in two weeks! Best wishes, Adam ---------------------- From: Sarah Hayes Subject: Natural search > I have pretty much stopped trying to understand Google. Can > anyone take a look at my website and suggest how it might > be better optimized for Google's natural search? - Bob Sheridan, LED 1857 Hi Bob, I can't help you with Google, I've given up trying to understanding it. Sites I try really hard with come no where, while others I don't bother with rank highly. I have noticed that my high ranking sites are the ones that I have had for 4 plus years, so perhaps it's due to links and the length of time and not so much to do with content or meta tags. One of my high ranking sites with Google disappeared and it was due to typo in the title. I corrected it, resubmitted the site and I was back at #4 within a couple of days. > I do use Overture's PPC but purposely have limited > my budget... Like others, I am convinced that there > is rampant "abuse" by competitors clicking... With reference to PPC fraud, I have just signed up with a service called Who's Clicking Who http://www.whosclickingwho.com to monitor PPC visits. I've only been using it a week on one of my websites, but so far I have caught out 3 people clicking multiple times (and they haven't come back). The good thing with this software is that it uses both IP address and cookies, so even if someone clicks on your listing using different dial-ups from different PPC search engines they still get caught. It even tracks AOL users using Proxy Servers. You can set it so that a pop up box appears on their screen (optional) telling them that they have clicked 5 or more time from a PPC Search Engine (this is set by you it could be 3 clicks or whatever you choose) and asks them nicely to bookmark the site for future visits. It also lets them know that you are monitoring for PPC fraud. I'm sure if you really know what you're doing you can get around it, but I guess most retail / service competitors wouldn't know how to and hopefully the message popping up on their screen will be enough to scare most of them off. Obviously if they continue you have independently monitored stats to show the PPC search engines. Sarah Hayes ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Neil Parker Subject: Old school > So now, who knows of anyone that has been around since > before October 1994? Can I claim to be the oldest pure play? - Brad Waller, LED 1855 I certainly have not been "around" that long but an anti virus comapany I resell for has. Below is the F-Secure ten years in the web media release. -------------------------- Tue, 11 May 2004 F-Secure celebrates ten years in the web Helsinki, Finland, 11 May 2004 F-Secure Corporation was one of the first companies in the world to establish an on-line presence. Our web site has been part of the Internet since 22 April 1994, which makes it by far the oldest on-line antivirus information source anywhere. We are now celebrating ten years of continuous service to roughly 50 million distinct users worldwide, and continue to serve almost one million visitors every month. How long a time is ten years? In Internet years, it is a very long time indeed. For example, in April 1994 there was no microsoft.com, ibm.com or apple.com. There were no search engines. No Google, no Yahoo, no MSN, or even Altavista. Likewise, there was no cnn.com, msnbc.com, bbc.co.uk, amazon.com, ebay.com, or paypal.com. Things like banner ads did not exist. No Java, no Real Audio, no Flash, no MP3 or Divx movies. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and Opera did not exist yet. The most common browsers of the time were NCSA Mosaic and Lynx, along with Cello and Winweb. When we went online, the most common desktop operating system was MS-DOS with Windows 3.11 that lacked a TCP/IP stack and required the use of add-on tools such as Trumpet WinSock. Most web surfers were using Unix-based systems. Windows 95 would only be released in a year and let the masses visit the Internet. In April 1994, there were around 2,000 web sites in the whole world. By 1996, there were 650,000 web sites. Now the count of public sites is well over five million worldwide. In 1994, most of the internet data traffic was FTP, followed by telnet, email and Gopher. Today, most of the traffic is created by web browsing, P2P networks and email spam. Most web sites and web users were coming from universities. Companies were just starting to get to the Internet. Of course, several websites did already exist. In addition to various universities, places like www.un.org and www.whitehouse.gov were already online. One of the first corporate websites was Digital's www.dec.com, started in 1993. Of course Digital has since been bought by Compaq which has been bought by HP, online now at hp.com. Likewise, F-Secure's first site was not called f-secure.com. In 1994, our company name was Data Fellows, and the site was datafellows.com. -------------------------- Regards, Neil Parker Websites that work. Computer solutions. www.12website.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Brad Waller Subject: Old school > One would need to look at much more than registering of dot com > names. I operated a business on-line through my ISP which had > (and I think still has) those things called tilda's ~ > http://www.btinternet.com/~englishwander/. - Philip Scriver, LED 1856 I'm looking for those still in business, such as Netmarket.com. For the sake of being able to make a grandiose claim, my thought is to compare to those other "dot coms" that are still around and operational. Some of the oldest sites / businesses were bought up and closed down (such as netcom.com, ISN.com, and others), so they don't count as oldest, just earliest. Sure, some of this is marketing speak, but that is the reason I'm doing this - marketing to make us sound the best! > No; I was around quite a long time before you. I was offering my > commercial services as a .Net before you made your entrance. > If you recall, you were threatening me with a lawsuit in about > 1995 for distributing Usenet to my network... You claimed to > own parts of the Usenet. - James Brausch, LED 1857 I think you are confusing me with someone else, as we only defended ourselves back then. The story sounds interesting though! Feel free to contact me off list if you want to go into more details. We were accused of lots of nasty things ourselves because we would post for sale ads in appropriate groups for users with notice per group policies, but still get flamed by the "non commercial" fans. I remember the old acoustic 300 baud modems. I used to hack into accounts at Caltech back when I was in high school (mostly to play Zork), and I had a coveted ARPAnet account in college for a bit. I was pretty much email and FTP and missed the early Web days, but my partners did some Web stuff in 1993. And don't worry about me getting offended, I think all of us who have been around this long have developed very thick skins! Brad Waller Classified Ad Affiliate Program: http://ep.com/b/csp.html Manage & Sell Site Banner Space: http://adjungle.com waller, ep.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mekhong Kurt Subject: Human touch Hello, Adam and LEDer's: I'm quite tardy in responding to Paul Magee's post in LED1853 -- between computer problems and minor illness, I've fallen way behind in all my work, including reading my e-mail, and just now (Tuesday, August 17th) read Paul's contribution. I found it superb, so wanted to write. I've had my web site up for several years, and for nearly 4 years have been writing a sometime sporadic column, one I'm trying to get around to writing weekly. My experiences in writing that column are what motivate me to comment on Paul's observations and general position regarding the use of the Internet. I fairly regularly get e-mail from visitors to my site complimenting me -- for the most part -- for whatever reason they happened to like something or the other they saw there. One consistent part of the comments I receive from visitors, even those who are writing to criticize something, is that they enjoy the human touch I strive to bring to my writings, as do my contributing writers. I'm also fairly regularly approached by complete strangers who say "Hey! I know you! You're Mekhong Kurt and I love your web site!" (My picture sits atop every column I write.) Such remarks are hugely gratifying, of course -- but more to the present point, they demonstrate the validity of Paul's focus on bringing a human voice to web sites. Two or 3 years ago, a local newspaper wrote a review of my web site for its online edition called it quirky, among other things. A number of my friends who saw the review were indignant on my behalf -- until I pointed out that I loved being so described, and felt the description could spark interest in a reader of the review (which contained a live link to the site). In the event, I got a fair number of hits from the link the reviewer kindly included. People like a personal voice -- even when they strongly disagree with the writer's position. And to you, directly, Paul, I hope you meet great success in marketing your services to help the owners of far-too-often cold web sites bring a touch of human warmth to those sites. With warm regards, Mekhong Kurt, Web Master Bangkok's Voice On The Web http://bangkokatoz.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Tom Aman Subject: URL errors > Occasionally... my fingers run slower than my brain and I type > an error into the address bar of my browser (I.E.6.0) and wind > up being redirected to some scummy page run by SearchWebNow... > Is there any way that I can get rid of it and designate my own > page...? - Jim Gatton, LED 1856 First, a general word of advice to everyone: If you hit a strange problem like this, try doing a search or two on Google for a solution. I spent most of a day trying to fix a friend's computer where the mouse cursor had disappeared - showed up fine in DOS or Windows Safe Mode, but not on a normal startup. Finally I did a search on Google and the first item listed describe the exact problem and gave the solution (a solution that took about a minute to actually do). In the case of SearchWebNow, a search on Google comes up with a lot of entries. The first two of these tell where it came from and how to get rid of it. The first entry goes into a lot of detail (SearchWebNow is just one variant of many) about how it ends up on your system and how to manually remove it. See http://www.spy-bot.net/lop.asp. The second entry also tells how to remove it and additionally offers software that will do the job. See http://www.spysweeper.com/remove-lop-com.html Hope this is helpful. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Gone honeymoonin' |
