Posts Tagged ‘click quality’

What is Click Quality?

Monday, February 11th, 2008

I would like to lay down a definition as to what I think constitutes click quality.

In one short sentence, I would describe click quality as the factor which will turn a click into a conversion.  The lower the click quality , the less likely a conversion is going to happen.

A conversion is the end action for which the site was designed.  This can be a sale for an e-commerce enabled site, a sign-up to an e-mail subscription, a sales lead, or a click to another site for affiliate marketers.

What is a high quality click?

A high quality click comes from someone in your targeted region(s) who is motivated to buy your good or services.  This comes from a highly optimised campaign only displaying your ads in the locations and to the people who matter, this is the holy grail of PPC advertising.

Where are the low quality clicks from?

The low quality clicks from from a number of locations:

The conclusion to this post is very simple, reduce your low quality clicks as much as possible in increase your chances of conversion and increase your advertising return on investment.

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My Top 5 Posts of 2007

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Here are my top five posts of 2007 and reasons why. in a dramatic Oscar stylie, they are in reverse order:

5) Publisher Click Fraud - A Definition

I have written a lot of definition pieces for people new to click fraud. This one seems to be getting the most attention, and is usually at the top of my most read post list.

4) For the ClickBot Doubters

People are searching for details on how to program click bots, who says there is no click fraud problem.

3) Sick Blogging A Lister Commits Click Fraud

In the pro blogging community, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net is probably the only A-List celebrity. I was able to gain a response to this tongue in cheek post from the man himself, the ability to add the hooded claw image from Penelope Pitstop was also a welcome bonus.
2) Operation Bot Roast

Not my most popular post, and not much content, but it was the one I enjoyed writing the most because of the last two lines. Sad I know but you need to get your enjoyment where you can,

1) Click Fraud - A Story of Intrigue

In this post I “out” a real incident of click fraud. It is the complete picture of detection, reparation request to refund. I still receive a huge amount of traffic for the site which originated teh publisher click fraud. I am sure the name of the site has been targnished when a search on their site name brings back an expose of the activity.

Lastly, my other favourite thing has been to collect satirical images for post, I hope you got the references.

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A Year in Click Fraud - 2007 Summary

Monday, December 24th, 2007

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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Click Fraud Network Recruit New Blogger

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Oh yeah, that would be yours truly.

I have been asked by Tom Cuthbert CEO and President of Click Forensics, the company behind the excellent click fraud index and click fraud network to be their resident blogger.

I will be writing about click fraud in a vendor neutral fashion trying to build up the conversation on CFN’s blog.

I will of course still be writing here at Fraudulent Clicks on the wider click fraud scene including news and reviews of click fraud products and companies, something which does not fit into my remit at CFN.

Why not visit their site and consider joining the network. It is 100% free and provides a wealth of resources in the fight against click fraud.

www.clickfraudnetwork.com

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Dubious Practices of Adwords For Domains

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Google have come under a lot of criticism this week for some of the less than scrupulous activities they are engaging with in the Adwords for domains programme.

The adwords for domain programme lets very large players in on-line search such as AOL or ASK syndicate the adverts of Adwords on their own sites. In exchange for this, Google pays out a share of the Adwords revenue.

This is a worthwhile and valid way to extend the reach of Adwords ads, and the search network helps Google to reach over 80% of the internet audience, but there are a number of properties which are not returning high quality clicks, but Google are charging their customers a premium.

The problem stems from domain parking companies such as DomainSponsor. Domain parking is the practice of holding a domain open on the internet without having any valid content on it. This is usually due to pre-registered domains which have never been developed, with the original purchase reason being to resell the domain.

So DomainSponsor and a number of other domain parking companies have signed up for the Adwords for domain programme, and are displaying adwords for domain ads on the parked sites. These ads are in context with the domain name.

People come to these domains largely by accident and any clicks on these made for adsense sites are usually of very low quality, and are unlikely to generate a conversion for the advertisers.

Now we come to the root problem of these sites, Google charge an advertiser for any clicks as if they were premium clicks emanating from a genuine search engine. This is direct contradiction to the Google policy of reducing the cost per click of low quality sites displaying ads via the adsense programme which these clicks closely resemble.

This is NOT click fraud, rather it is low quality clicks being masked as premium search clicks which tarnishes the reputation further of an organisation which deliberately obscures it operating procedures.

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Low Quality Clicks As A Means of Passive Demonstration

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

I was musing the other day on whether click fraud or invalid clicks could ever be a good thing. This lead me to the concept of using invalid clicks to demonstrate against evil corporations by effecting their bottom line.

Here is the scenario I envisaged. My evil corporation, lets call them MegaBad Things Corp has invented a new anti ageing cream for sale only to the wives of mega wealthy Oligarchs, the terrible thing is that they make the cream by squashing cute ickle kittens into a gooey mess whilst they are still alive, to make things worse the machine operators laughs (he has to laugh, it is in the corporate squashing manual) and twirls his evil waxed moustache.

I’m outraged, I must take action , here is my plan:

  • I find the keywords MegaBad Things corp are bidding on, in this example it is the name of face cream “From Hag to Fab”
  • I find a large group of like minded people and tell them my plan
  • At a pre-defined hour of action we type in the keyword and click on the paid ad
  • We browse around their site for while, looking at various pages before heading off to the investor relations page
  • We click on the contact us link and send a message in the following format

I am complaining about your kittie squashing actions. I have done this by effecting your bottom line via your pay per click budget. I have clicked on a link without any intention of buying your products. This is eating up your daily budget and reducing sales.

Please stop squashing kitties, I will continue to perform this act until you stop your actions.

  • Net effect, hundreds if not thousands of messages to the investor relation team, PPC daily budget eaten up by low quality clicks with the desired effect of reducing sales.

MegaBad Things is an evil corporation and they are not about to lie down and take this type of cr*p from a bunch of liberal and probably poor cat lovers, so they approach the search engine and demand a refund. Are these click fraudulent? I don’t think they are, they are very low quality to be sure, but the company has invited people to find their website by typing in the particular keywords. Just because they don’t buy “Hag to Fab” does not mean the process is fraud.

It could work, but I am prepared to bet that as soon as MegaBad Things Corp e-mails their analytics showing a trail from a keyword to the investor relation page the search engines will cave and issue a refund. They know who pays the bills.

Keep on fighting the powers brothers and sisters.

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Click Quality Council

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

And lo the white council did meet and Elrond ordered that before them they be presented the ring of the enemy..

No, not that kind of council, but a click quality council has been formed of eminent members of the click fraud community and it has agreed upon an eight point action plan:

Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.

Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.

Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.

Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.

Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.

Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.

Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.

Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

Further details of their work including an interesting videocast can be seen at click quality council

This commentator cannot agree more with the seventh point, the sooner third part auditing of invalid clicks is introduced the better. Search engines are refusing to be transparent to their customers, so companies such as the big four accountancy firms should be sent in to test, but not diverge the methods of invalid click detection and reparation.

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