| LED Digest 2281: Bogus Clicks on Parked Domains |
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A post today in the Click Fraud thread explains how fraudulent clicks actually impact legitimate publishers the most. Why? Because publishers end up getting paid less overall for their clicks, as bids decrease... ================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration 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 .............................................. November 3, 2006 Issue no. 2281 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== --== Call Center Solutions? ==-- ~ Adam Boettiger "Can anyone suggest a good company to work with?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== ClickFraud - What's a Valid Click? ==-- ~ Mary Johnson "...I am convinced that click fraud does exist and it is mainly with these secondary search engines." ~ Barry S Mills "...the victims of click fraud are most probably not the advertisers, but the honest publishers..." --== Blog Experiments ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill "...you shouldn't be using a remotely-hosted service like Blogger...in the first place." ~ Brett Simpson "My question revolves around some of the more advanced features of blogging, such as Blog & Ping." <Moderator Comment> "...be sure to do some research [on Blog and Ping]..." --== The Sweet 16 ==-- ~ Allan Gardyne "...trying to apply [this tip] every day has played a major part in the growth on my one business." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Hardware and Software [was: New Browsers] ==-- ~ Tom Aman --== Who am I? Name Look-up Sites ==-- ~ John "Zeke" Brumage ========== NEW =================================== From: Adam Boettiger Subject: Call-center solutions for small business? I have a client who is in need of a virtual call-center service (live answering after hours), who is not big enough to get on the radar of the giant call-center companies, but has a need for that type of service. Can anyone suggest a good company to work with? TIA Off-list to adam,i-advertising.com Adam Boettiger http://www.i-advertising.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Mary Johnson Subject: Click fraud >What defines a valid click? Further to this: > What defines an INVALID click? - Michael Motherwell, LED Digest 2280 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1300/55/ Let me share my personal experience with click fraud. It does exist and I can prove it. I have a customer who had been using PPC for 3 years before hiring me to set up a tracking tool to analyze his conversions. He had blindly signed up for anything he could -- thinking they were all equal, but had no way to know for sure what was giving him results. He was a perfect candidate for a tracking tool because he had an online shopping cart -- there was a direct relationship between a clicked on keyword and an online sale. I implemented the tool and verified that it was tracking correctly. This tool really is quite amazing in that I could verify, against our sales in the shopping cart, that everything was getting tracked properly and the dollar amounts matched up. It told us what keywords (PPC and organic) were actually converting to sales. What I found was that there were no conversions with most of his "secondary" PPC engines (Kanoodle, MIVA, Enhance), for which he was spending $300 per month each. However, his conversions from Google and Yahoo! were quite high for the same keywords. Another difference was the "average time on the site" metric for visitors (a very significant measurement of relevancy and interest in his product). This metric was consistently high from Google and Yahoo! but was extremely low with the "secondary" PPC engines. When I analyzed the "click fraud report" that came with the tracking tool, the IP addresses were, for the most part, different (they have apparantly gotten pretty sophisticated about this, knowing that this is an obvious give-away of fraud), but the number of pages visited and the average time on the site were obviously not from interested individuals. I am talking one second with only one page viewed for nearly 100% of the traffic from these secondary search engines. Anyway, from my pesonal experience, I am convinced that click fraud does exist and it is mainly with these secondary search engines. As a side note regarding MIVA, when we had no conversions, I thought I had not set up my tracking properly, so I went to their website to see who their affiliates were and then ran "tests". The tests consisted of searching on one of our paid keyword phrases from their affiliates (like Mamma.com) , clicking on the PPC ad, making a purchase, and looking to see if it showed up in the tracking tool's metrics. What I noticed was that our PPC ad did show up in the affiliate site but when I clicked on it, it had the keyword pair tracking codes from Google (not MIVA). When I contacted MIVA and asked them about this, they said that they do get feeds from Google. When I asked them where our MIVA ads were showing up that we were being charged $300 for each month, they refused to tell me. I even talked with their manager, and got the same response. I couldn't believe it. They expected us to blindly pay for advertising that we couldn't even see. We immediately stopped our advertising with them. Mary Johnson, Software Engineer Web Site Helper LLC www.websitehelper.com "Web It Up to the Next Level" -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Barry Mills Subject: Click fraud There are 2 types of click fraud. There's organised, mass clicking by humans or robots. Google ought to be able to detect that, and if it does, it's important the perpetrators are prosecuted, not just banned from Google. Much harder to detect, and much more prevalent I expect, is site owners manually clicking ads on their own sites from time to time. I doubt that can ever be stamped out, but I don't really think it matters too much. What surprises me is all the talk of advertisers losing and Google gaining. I don't think so, not in most cases. PPC is a "perfect market" and if fraudulent clicks were reduced, the value of clicks would go up, bids would follow, and equilibrium would be restored. Google get paid for generating sales, not clicks, because advertisers determine their bids according to expected ROI. So the victims of click fraud are most probably not the advertisers, but the honest publishers, who get a bit less for their genuine clicks than they should. Technologically, if there's an answer, it might be the use of affiliate style tracking to sales, with low-converting sites being weeded out. What matters (or should) to an advertiser is the cost per acquisition or sale, rather than the proportion of dishonest clicks. As an advertiser, I'm more worried about the PPC ads on irrelevant parked domain names than I am about bogus clicks. On domain parking sites I'm sure most visitors click a link or two just because they are bewildered as to why they've typed in a domain or followed a search link to generic_specific_term.com and found a page full of random links about anything and everything apart from the subject they'd expected. Gut feel tells me that those sites generate lots of clicks (I know this because I know how much people running such sites pay for domain names) but as near as doesn't matter no sales at all (that is a guess - I would love to hear from anyone who knows for sure). Barry S Mills, Managing Director Netstep Corporate Communications http://www.netstep.co.uk -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Blog experiments Hi Adam > If you are serious about building a brand or making money > online you should publish your content to your own domain > because it can be hard to reclaim a website's link equity and > age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a > subdomain on someone else's website. - Aaron Wall's SEO Glossary - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1295/174/#blogger I might be provocative and suggest that if you are serious about building a brand, credibility etc. you shouldn't be using a remotely-hosted service like Blogger or TypePad for publishing your content in the first place ;-) I am wary of the situation where my content is stored on their server, even if I'm actually publishing the HTML pages to my server. You might wake up one day and find Blogger has disappeared, or changed its business model. If your blog is an integral part of your business, install blog software such as Wordpress (which is free) on your server, where you have control over every aspect of it. Blogger is fine for a blog which is just a playground (I have a toy blog at Blogger) but it's still best to publish to your own server. Regards Veronica Yuill Archetype IT http://www.archetype-it.com/thebackburner/ -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Brett Simpson Subject: Blog experiments James, I'm not sure, but I think you missed my point. Setting up a template, from what I see, is not that hard with WordPress. My question revolves around some of the more advanced features of blogging, such as Blog & Ping (see: http://www.bloggingequalizer.com ), Ad Spaces (AdSense), RSS, Archives, Keyword Tagging, Shopping Cart Plugins (see: http://www.semiologic.com/solutions/sem-theme-pro/ ) and many others. What I'm interested in most is IF there is an advantage to run software dedicated to these tasks, such as those mentioned, which generally run $100-$300/each, or if running WordPress out of the box provides enough of a architecture to handle these tasks by itself? I know it can be difficult getting a template in place, but I'm not too concerned about that, it seems to be straightforward CSS, or HTML/Php and that's not too hard, in fact there are plenty of sites offering free tips/templates for doing whatever you want. However, it seems when it comes to some of these more advanced features - you've got to shell out big bucks to get the systems in place. Are these high-priced (IMO) systems worth it? Has anyone compared traffic from a straight 'out of box' WordPress to one that is running a high-end template / CMS / Blog-Ping software? Anyone? Thank You, Brett Simpson http://www.thedreamtime.com <Moderator Comment> Brett, before you plunk down any money for that "Blog and Ping" package, be sure to do some research. While pingback in itself is a useful tool for bloggers with real, legitimate content, this technique is often used by those with less-than-stellar reputations. The tool you reference is software that "... spiders a domain you enter and then spams a blog post on one of your fake blogs to have Yahoo! quickly index all the pages on that site." This quote is from Aaron Wall in a review of this tool, and is a great overall look at the process: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000813.shtml Bottom line is you don't need to spend a dime. If you're spending money for something like this you're wasting it. This sort of functionality is built right in to the social media sites and the Web, so use these services instead: http://pingoat.com/ http://pingomatic.com/ .... I'm sure there are others. Hope this helps, Adam -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Allan Gardyne Subject: The Sweet 16 I've taken to heart one piece of advice John gave (I think it was at Thom Reece's conference in Hawaii). John said something like this: "Do something every day to improve your business - no matter how small." He described how he'd be about to go to bed, and would ask himself, "Have I done something today to improve my business?" If the answer was no, he'd go back downstairs and do something. It's so easy to get bogged down in daily trivia and lose sight of the big picture. I believe that remembering this tip and trying to apply it every day since has played a major part in the growth on my one business. Thanks, John! Allan Gardyne http://www.associateprograms.com Comment? http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1286/174/ ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Aman Subject: Hardware & Software [was: New browsers] > My mainstay system is Win98SE2, FireFox 2.0. - Al Toman, LED Digest 2280 This is not really about "New browsers", but it is about "newer" stuff. Al's post about his mainstay system being Win98SE2 along with a free replacement monitor that I just acquired brought this to mind. First, regarding Win98 - I know that many, many of you are still running Win98, mostly because of all the "problems" reported with XP. I ran Win98SE2 myself until about a year ago when I decided I HAD to go to XP because of my software development. Too many people with newer systems running later operating systems were encountering problems because my install packages and software being developed on Win98. So I took the plunge and went to Win XP Pro. In short order I was kicking myself for not making the switch sooner as it is so stable compared to Win98. Yes, I have crashed occasionally, but not several times a week like I had experienced with Win98. My wife is still using Win98 as her system is used mainly for Web surfing and email and is too old to handle XP, but if you have a system that can handle it comfortably, it could be well worth your time and effort to make the upgrade. It has probably saved me more in time gained (from lack of crashes) than it cost for the upgrade. Second, think about your monitor. If it is showing its age, consider an update. I was using a 17 inch Samsung 7e and was basically satisfied with it. Visiting my daughter early in the week, she mentioned that she had a monitor that she no longer needed and was thinking of passing along to the Goodwill thrift shop if nobody wanted it. I said I could probably find a home for it (figuring someone else in the family might like it) and took it with me. It is a 17 inch Samsung SyncMaster 753DF (flat screen). I decided to check it out on my own system before doing anything else, plugged it in and was amazed at the quality of the display - much better than the one I was using. Then I looked at some dates - my old monitor was made in 1998 (had I really had it that long?), the newer one was made in 2001. Anyway, I decided to keep it myself. The display is much sharper and I can comfortably use it at 1152 x 864 (I could only use my old one at 1024 x 768) so I have gained a lot of screen real estate (12.5% in both horizontal and vertical directions, 26.5% in area) and a much easier to read (sharper) display. And since a 3 year jump gave me such an improvement, I am going to have a serious look at some of the current monitors available. Again, if your monitor has been around for awhile, you might make your computing easier with an update. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: John "Zeke" Brumage Subject: Name lookup > I googled my name today, salem kashou, and > found top-end results with links like this... - Salem Kashou, LED Digest 2280 I think this is most likely because the directories have high "authority." you might consider registering your name as a domain name. Then put your Bio and links to your important pages under that domain name. No match for "SALEMKASHOU.COM". Last update of whois database: Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:04:47 EST "SALEM-KASHOU.COM" is also available. Using you name in a domain creates a site that is more authorative for your name. And links to your other sites from there will carry more weight. Another way to get better scores would be to participate in forums and providing feedback to other websites. Most allow a link back to one of your pages, and as long as you are providing content, not just spamming them, your content will be welcome. John Brumage Disco Legend Zeke ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR." - Mark Twain |
