Click Fraud Blog
What Is The Content Network?
December 30th, 2007
I often talk about the problem of publisher click fraud from the content network, I thought it was worthwhile to write a short post explaining exactly what this network is.
The content network is a concept used by Google. The search engine giant syndicate Adword advertisments onto members of their content network through the Adsense programme.
Using adsense third party websites owners can add small pieces of code onto their site, and ads will be displayed. Google spiders the site to see what kind of content the site has and matches ads to this content, thereby having an in-context ad solution.
Google and the website owner then share the ad revenues. It is not know what the proportion of the share is, but it can be assumed that Google take the lion share.
The purpose of the content network is to increase the reach of adword ads. It is estimated that this enables Google to reach 80% of the Internet’s audience (Google’s own figures).
When you create an ad on the Adwords platform by default your ads are not displayed on the content network. You must explicitly opt into this program.
Content network clicks tend to be of a lower quality, meaning that fewer clicks convert into actual sales.
As a parting note, I always advise my clients to analyze their conversion rates from the content network. Do not use scatter gun approach, be selective and target sites you trust. Failure to do so will probably result in publisher click fraud attacks.
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Tags: publisher click fraud
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