Click Fraud Blog
A Year in Click Fraud - 2007 Summary
December 24th, 2007
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Merry Christmas to all the readers of Fraudulent Clicks. It has been about five months since the doors opened here at FC. I would like to spend a little bit of time reflecting on my first year in blogging and the plans I have for 2008.
A look back at 2007
In the first few formative months there has been much fussing with my theme and generally getting to grips with the blogging platform I use here namely Wordpress.
In the beginning this blog started as an experiment to see how people would take to the idea of a click fraud blog. I saw a bit of a niche I could capitalise on. People were writing about click fraud as part of wider PPC blogs or they were blogs tied to click fraud suppliers system and did not offer an independent view of the space.
I started using the free Blogger tool. Whilst it was adequate it did not give me the flexibility I wanted, also there is not the development and support of plugins and tools as there is for the wordpress platform.
I have built a substantial sized archive of posts, and I am ranking quite highly on the search engines for a number of key words. I am very happy with this development.
Whilst everyone else was grumbling about the last page rank update, I was quietly exstatic. Havin sat with a lowly no -page rank for a number of months I jumped to a massive 1.
Was it a success. Yes and no. People are saying good things about my blog, it is opening doors for me, but in a negative way, readership is not as high as I want, people are not engaging in the conversation via comments enough, sometimes it feels like no one is reading.
PremiumNews Theme
I have finally settled on my desired look and feel (or theme) for my site. It is a premium theme called PremiumNews, it was designed and distributed by Adii, the self proclaimed Wordpress Rockstar. This gives me the ability to run my blog like a magazine with news snippets, longer featured items, reviews and case studies (if I ever get any takers - see below).
Case Studies
I was completely underwhelmed by the silence of my request for case studies. I was honestly offering free click fraud case studies to my readers. It obvously came over as some sort of scam. As everyone knows TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). I will try again next year to get readers involved. The reason I am doing the case studies is to develop an archive of different types of click fraud attack to educate this blogs readership. This is not completely altruistic. The more readers, the more attractive I am to my advertising sponsors. That is my motive for case the studies.
LQ Register
I plan to do a lot more work on low quality clicks. Low quality clicks are visits which are highly unlikely to generate conversions. These come from MFAs, Adwords for domains or other sites which are completely legitimate but are working near the edge of syndicated ad rules.
I will be building a register of these low quality sites, and making it available to subscribers of this site so they can prevent their ads from being displayed
The idea is to allow people to add sites which are low quality to the register, these will of course be quality controlled to avoid abuse.
The list will be available for download to add to your ppc accounts and block your ads for being displayed by these type of sites.
I have trepidations at the moment that the list might be too long, but we will see. Please leave comments on this post if you are interested in the LQ register.
Blogging on Click Fraud Network
Towards the end of the year I was asked by Tom Cuthbert of Click Fraud Network (CFA) to develop the blog on their network. This is a big deal to me as there is a huge readership on the CFN but very little content production. I aim to create a steady stream of posts and develop a conversational feel.
What I get from the network is OPT (Other peoples traffic). I hope my exposure on CFN will drive traffic here.
Click Fraud Risk Assessment
I am developing an e-book which will go on sale early next year. It is a practical course on how to perform a risk assessment of your ppc campaigns. It is a DIY version of one part of my consultancy product. It will take the reader through the various types and forms of click fraud, how to assess their campaigns to decide if they are at a low or high risk of click fraud.
The other alternative is to set this up as a subscription on my blog. This would then create a more interactive audience and I can participate in the converstation to bring my expertise to the risk assesments. Please leave a comment on which you think is the best route.
Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year
That’s me for this year, finally I would like to say Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year to all my readers.
Neil Matthews
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