As Pay Per Click (PPC) search advertising pros we hear a good deal of things about PPC when we are speaking to customers and possible customers. Possibly the funniest tales we hear, clearly here in Yorkshire, are of fraud. Everyone, it seems, seems to understand some narrative of office employees arriving from the bar on a Friday afternoon to go on’net and click competitions advertisements; of call center workers being educated (nearly Willy Wonka enjoy) into Google competitors key words and click on their sites; of housewives up and down the nation repetitively clicking on competitors websites; of enormous budgets being discounted and businesses being brought to their knees from the devious strategies of mischievous scallywags and so on. Are you being scammed by PPC Fraudsters?

Without delving into the motivation behind such behavior, possibly the very first aspect to consider is whether or not Google, Yahoo et al has contemplated this and if their legions of PhDs and other highly trained, educated and compensated individuals could possibly be a game to get a load of slightly inebriated blokes and exhausted call center workers? Google positions because the 241st biggest company in America (at the 2007 Fortune 500 listing – though its earnings have risen by 56% then). It has annual revenues of more than16.5bn, virtually all of that come from PPC Advertising. Call me naïve or even blasé but do you believe that they would put their standing and the unbelievable income streams this standing enables them to create, in danger for the sake of not coping with one of their few possible flaws of the product?

There are rumors that a number of the lesser search engines aren’t quite as strict in their pursuit of click fraud because the 3, but in fact stopping insistent clicking and identifying massive quantities of clicks from one ip address or variety isn’t rocket science, not when considering all of the other things they’re doing and fantastic technological improvements they’re making. In the majority of our bigger advertisers balances, we see routine ‘quality alteration’ credits, in which Google has concerns over the validity of clicks and mechanically pays back the price of those google adwords agency with guarantee.

Second any PPC manager worth their salt has fraud avoidance processes in place; frequently assessing traffic patterns to identify potential click fraud and spreading that the research engines of any suspicious traffic. It’s the basic idea of PPC is that whatever is traceable, therefore if a specific keyword is creating substantial volumes of quickly departing traffic i.e. bounces, or some other degree of inferior quality, i.e. non-converting traffic, your PPC supervisor should remove it as a matter of course. Similarly, if a specific area of the nation is creating massive volumes of bad quality/non-converting visitors, your PPC accounts supervisor will exclude that, even barring IP addresses or ranges from viewing your advertisements if needed.

And the major purpose about PPC is that it’s dynamic, flexible, responsive and controllable. In case your PPC campaign is not working you alter it so it will or you discontinue it. Call me naïve again, but I truly struggle to comprehend how anybody can fall foul of a few of the anecdotes I hear, with of the possible safeguards which are readily available.

1 place I do see has more scope for fraud and that’s often discussed in Search Engine/Online Marketing circles are articles advertisements and, in particularly, AdSense. Since Google shares the revenue of those ads together with the owner of the site, there’s a real incentive for the site owner to turn into a joyful clicker. But that said, Google intentionally deals content clicks at substantially lower prices than lookup clicks, each click is still traceable so special websites with elevated levels of inferior excellent traffic could be redeemed and (again) suspicious IP addresses be deducted from viewing your advertisements, therefore, once again, you can become really great value advertising in the content network should you run it properly.