Pay Per Click Fraud Article

[Lowell Rieger]

Saw an interesting article this morning about PPC click fraud.

This is from the San Francisco Chronicle's sfgate.com, and the article's main source is Outsell, Inc. a market research company.

Points:

Advertisers believe 14.6% of clicks are fraudulent

Money paid for bogus clicks in 2005 $800 million

Advertisers who said they were victims of bogus clicks 75%

Advertisers who said they reduced click-based advertising or plan to: 37 %

Revenue lost by Google, Yahoo and other Web sites, as a result: $500 million

Advertisers who request refunds because of fraud: 7%

Average refund: $9,507


I know I have experienced fraudulent clicks, as my web logs have shown 50 or so consecutive clicks in a very short period of time from just one web site. That was before I learned to turn off content ads

Your thoughts?

[Rosalind Gardner]

Great tip, Lowell.

Although I know affiliates who say they do well with content ads, I've never had much luck with them other than to increase my PPC expenditures without getting very much in return.

[mrrb]

But doesn't google watch out for PPC Fraud? I've run several campaigns where I don't want to spend the high per click cost for search but the ads still run at the lower cost as content ads. On some of them, the only sales that were generated came from the content ads.

What are some other low-cost ways of generating traffic if Google adwords is beyond my budget?
I do alot of article marketing as well but that takes awhile to propagate through the web. Any other ideas?

MRRB