PPC Fraud - Advertisers Unite!

[Scout720]

I am surprised that PPC Fraud does not get more attention. Have we all resigned ourselves to accepting it as the cost of doing business? Yet, each day it eats away our profits and advertising budget taking us off line and making our ads unavailable to legitimate buyers!

Google and Yahoo have no real incentive to correct this problem. It generates massive amounts of revenue for their companies every day!

Notice the Search Engines are offering the New Local Search, which has the ability to filter traffic that pertains only to a small business area. However, they do not offer the ability to limit foreign traffic from your site! Why is that? Because they are aware that many of the Fraudulent PPC come form other countries and do not want to lose that revenue!

Any site whose only purpose is to generate revenue from advertising should be suspicious!

Take notice of Shopping Directory Sites whose only content is PPC Ads appearing in your website statistics. Many have the same IP Address but use several different Domain Names through Masking techniques to avoid detection! Most of these sites cannot be found in a search on any Engine. So where does this traffic come from? Do they have their own Pay Per Read network? Do they have their own Spy Bot Network?

Why would the Search Engines sign up such sites to carry our ads anyway? Again, they are counting on our ignorance and will accept the few claims made by advertisers who do the research and make the claim. This is peanuts compared to the revenue these sites generate for the Search Engines!


I encourage every Advertiser to write to Google and Yahoo though your advertising control panel insisting that they make following changes:

1. Ability to Opt Out of Advertising on Foreign Domains.

2. Ability to Opt Out of Sites whose only Content is PPC Advertising.

3. Ability to Filter PPC visitors outside your area of business.

It is my belief that these changes would go a long way in fighting PPC Fraud. They are changes that the Search Engines have the ability to make but WILL NOT without pressure from the Advertisers.

This problem will only get bigger unless we act together.

These are my thoughts - What are yours?

[Cutter]

Notice the Search Engines are offering the New Local Search, which has the ability to filter traffic that pertains only to a small business area. However, they do not offer the ability to limit foreign traffic from your site! Why is that? Because they are aware that many of the Fraudulent PPC come form other countries and do not want to lose that revenue!

Whenever you start up an Adwords campaign it asks you which countries you want it to run in, effectively filtering out traffic from countries you don't want.

If you don't want to advertise on foreign domains, stay out of the content network, or only run ads on specific sites you like.

I think you are confusing "contentless" PPC sites with direct navigation sites. These are either premium domain names or sites that used to be popular but let their domain expire and it was snatched up.

[WSM2006]

I am surprised that PPC Fraud does not get more attention.

Actually, click fraud gets a lot of attention. There is an article in Wired this month (Google vs Click Fraud) about it, how it works, etc. Granted, it's an easy target and certainly a matter of major concern for advertisers.

I wrote an article about click fraud (http://magazine.websiteservices.com/blogs/posts/articles/click_fraud_hype.aspx) and through my research I learned that you can in fact ask PPC providers to block IPs or sets of IPs. Some 2nd tier PPCs don't even accept traffic from specific countries .

Cutter's right, Adwords does allow you to pick the geo-specific region you would like to advertise in and only shows your advertisement. I'm not sure about Yahoo but I hear the new MSN Adcenter does allow geo-targeting.

[LuckyShima]

I use geotargeting and only place my adwords campaigns on search, and I track the IP and the referral page of every click coming in. From my experience, I think google has improved in this area over the last year. I used to be getting as much as 20% of clicks I didn't want (but with only small outlay it wasn't important at that time). Biggest problem over the last couple of months has been clicks coming in from sedoparking, I think there is some sort of scam running from the site 'pillreport .com.au' which seems to send me a lot of clicks for a useless parked domain, but the impact is still small so not worth worrying about at this stage. If I increase expenditure, as I might, and the number of these clicks from sedoparking increase, then I might do something about it.