Click Fraud Increasing
If you have been reading our blog you can easily see that we are not big fans of Pay Per Click advertising. We rarely write about PPC, and in general we don’t recommend it to our clients, other than to supplement a Search Engine Optimization campaign. It’s not that we don’t believe it has value in some situations, but our philosophy is that Paid Search Campaigns can be a good supplement to a Search Engine Optimization, especially in the early stages, but over the long term it is not as effective or efficient as a good Search Engine Optimization campaign.
This report by Click Forensics outlines the increase in Paid Search Click Fraud, and shows that the instances of click fraud are increasingly performed by Automated Bots. In summary, 17.1% of all clickthroughs on paid search advertising are fraudulent, an increase from 16.3% in 2008.
More disturbing is the fact that 30% of all click fraud is being done by automated bots, which leads us to believe that the trend will only continue. To read the rest of the article, follow this link here – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/27/report-click-fraud-at-record-high/
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Good info on PPC! Let this comment take as discussion, as I want to ask few some facts from you about pay per click. Do you think that pay per click is important for every webmaster? How much ppc expense (in percentage) of your income do you think is ok to incur? Actually, I have no experience about PPC, as I never used it for my websites and still I am gaining a lot of customers and sales. I am not going to say anything about my way of working because I do not want you to consider this comment as spam. But visiting my site can give you more information about how I am gaining thousands of customers in short time without PPC. I visited your blog because I am collecting information about the webmasters, campaigns and anything about pay per click that’s why when I saw your blog is great, I could not stop myself sharing something. In my opinion PPC is only beneficial if you optimize keywords and use the most relevant keywords only! Let this discussion going on? What are your views? Your Blog is really a great one! Maintaining a blog like yours is not an easy task, yet you did that! Congrates! – Any Comments? – Thanks – Regards
I agree that PPC is best used to target the most appropriate, highest converting keywords. PPC as a traffic source, purely for traffic alone is not a great way to spend your money. The same budget would be much better spent on a social media / buzz marketing campaign if traffic is the goal. PPC does have some features that SEO doesn’t, including high level keywords on a local basis, without adding the geographic modifier. Example: to use SEO and target a term like “Denver SEO”, you must use that specific term in your link-building and on-site SEO, whereas a PPC campaign can target the term “SEO”, and be geographically limited to Denver, or Colorado. The other benefit that PPC has over SEO is that it takes effect almost immediately, and you can start getting visitors to your site without months of work and investment. Overall, I would say that an Internet Marketing campaign that utilizes a combination of both may be the most effective…