AdWords “click fraud” danger is real…

Jim Edwards here with a rather sobering article (below) for
you…

If you spend (or plan to spend) any money on pay-per-click
advertising on Google AdWords or Overture, you MUST read
this article right now.

It’s about how competitors and unscrupulous search engine
affiliates can bleed your advertising budget dry and leave
you nothiing to show for it.

(It’s NOT meant to scare you and it does not mean I am
against pay-per-click advertising, but it *IS* meant as a
wakeup call for you to start paying attention to this issue.)

Feel free to share this article on your blog, on your
website, in your autoresponder, or in your newsletter (see
simple reprint instructions at the end).

To your success,

Jim

PS – DO NOT BUY A COPY OF JOHN REESE’S “TRAFFIC SECRETS”
By my estimate, you will get at least 5 to 10 emails
today regarding the re-release of John Reese’s “Traffic
Secrets” course (and all the emails will be virtually
identical).

Now, in my opinion, John’s course is by far the most
comprehensive when it comes to teaching you ALL the
different ways to get traffic to your website.

How do I know it’s any good? Because I’ve used it to train
my own staff to generate traffic for our online businesses!

But I’m telling you NOT to buy a copy of his course *UNTIL
AFTER* you listen to the MP3 (and download a PDF transcript)
of a *90 minute interview* where I grilled John about
traffic and his ability to teach other people how to quickly
get an avalanche of targeted traffic to their own websites…

(By the way, the MP3 and PDF transcript are fr^e when you
click this link)…

=> http://www.ebookfire.com/trafficmastermp3.html

Only *after* you review this interview you should go to
John’s site and immediately purchase a copy of his course
by clicking this link:

=> http://www.ebookfire.com/john/

On with the article…

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Advertising “Click Fraud” Rampant Online?

– by Jim Edwards

© Jim Edwards – All Rights reserved
http://www.thenetreporter.com
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“Pay-per-click,” by far the most popular form of online
advertising, recently came under fire as charges of rampant
“click fraud” gather steam on the Web.

Google and Yahoo! earn the majority of their money through
sales of advertising to tens-of-thousands of online
merchants, companies, and professional.

In fact, some estimate that 99% of all Google’s revenue
comes from advertising sales. Unfortunately, allegations of
click fraud may well rain on Google’s otherwise sunny
parade and cause a whole scale revamping of current online
advertising practices.

Pay-per-click advertising does exactly what it sounds:
advertisers pay for each click on their ad, usually mixed
in among search engine results or displayed on relevant
websites.

“Click fraud” occurs when, for whatever reason, an ad gets
clicked by someone or something (usually an automated “bot”
that simulates clicks) with no intention of ever buying
anything from the advertiser.

The sole intention of click fraud is to simply drain an
advertiser’s budget and leave them with nothing to show but
an empty wallet.

Who commits click fraud?

Usually an unscrupulous competitor who wants to break a
rival’s bank, online “vandals” who get their kicks causing
other people grief, or search engine advertising affiliates
who want to earn fat commissions by racking up piles of
bogus clicks.

Regardless of who does it or why, click fraud appears to be
a growing problem search engines hope stays under their
advertising clients’ radar.

This problem isn’t exactly news to the search engine
giants.

In fact, on page 60 of their 3rd quarter Report for 2004,
Google admits that they have “regularly refunded revenue”
to advertisers that was “attributed to click-through
fraud.”

Google further states that if they don’t find a way to deal
with this problem “these types of fraudulent activities
could hurt our brand.”

Bottom line for Google and Yahoo! (which owns Overture, the
Web’s largest pay-per-click search engine): as word of
click fraud spreads across the Web, they must act quickly
to calm the nerves of advertisers who could well abandon
them over doubts about the veracity of their advertising
charges.

The search engines all claim to carry measures that
identify and detect click fraud, but details about how they
do it and to what extent remain sketchy.

They claim revealing details about security would
compromise their efforts and give the perpetrators a leg up
on circumventing their defenses.

This sounds good, but affords little comfort to advertisers
who feel caught between losing out on their best traffic
sources and paying for advertising that won’t result in
revenue.

One way to protect your business against click fraud is to
closely monitor your website statistics.

Look for an unusually high number or regular pattern of
clicks from the same IP address.

If you need help, enlist the aid of your hosting provider
to aid you in spotting suspicious trends in your website
traffic.

Also, a number of services such as ClickSentinel.com have
sprung up online to help advertisers spot and quickly
analyze and compile the data necessary to effectively
dispute fraudulent click charges with the search engines.

–
Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the
co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how
to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted
visitors to your website, affiliate links, or blogs…

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