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10 Quick and Easy Steps To Building A HIGHLY Targeted And Responsive Opt-In List
Copyright 2005 The IWE, LLC. All Rights Reserved. We've all heard it that in order to stay in business online you need to build a Targeted 'Opt-In' list. Well... I truly have to agree with that simply because this is where you'll always have a...
A Beginner's Checklist to Promoting an Online Business (Part 2)
This week we continue with Part 2 of our 3-part series on how to market your online business. Part 1 is available at http://onlinebusinessbasics.com/articles/checklist1.html . As much as we all love free stuff, an Internet business is still a...
How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?
Internet Marketing requires you to sale other people's products or services, or if you have decided to create your own product, sale your own. But whether you are selling your own or others, we all have one thing in common - getting traffic to our...
PPC Ads – Keep your Ad campaign on track
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns can be a thorny business. Some ads that we spent as little as 5 minutes on can generate tremendous income whereas ads that we spend half a day laboring over will sometimes just sit there and cost us money.
After...
SEO Advertisting & Pay Per Click PPC
Advertising can be an easy way to break into the internet but there are many downsides to it. Unless you are running a community based site, have a site offering very unique content, a valuable service or product the traffic usually only comes as...
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Click Fraud – Threatening the Internet Economy
One of the most popular forms of Internet advertising is pay-per-click (PPC). Merchants place ads with search engines like Google or MSN and the ad appears whenever someone enters a relevant search.
If the ad is clicked the merchant pays a fee – anywhere from 5 cents to $100. It’s a fabulous idea – ad campaigns targeted at your most likely customers.
It’s such a fabulous idea that Google, the king of PPC, grossed $1.24 billion in the first 3 months of this year – most of it from advertising revenue.
Watch out, though. There’s trouble in PPC land. The flip side to PPC is a phenomenon called “click fraud” or “click spam.”
There are two types of click fraud. The first type occurs when someone maliciously clicks on your PPC ad to drive up your advertising costs. It could be a competitor or a disgruntled former employee.
The second type of fraud involves clicking on affiliate ads to generate income. Affiliate ads are placed on third party web sites and each time someone clicks on an affiliate ad the web site owner receives a commission.
Industry observers believe that affiliate click fraud is the biggest problem of the two. Either way, the result is the same – advertising budget depletion with little gain for the merchant.
Either type of click fraud can be accomplished with the use of automated “robots” or by hiring an army of workers. The India Times reported in 2004 that a “growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100
to $200 per month.”
How serious is the problem? It’s hard to judge exactly, but click fraud is commonly estimated at 20% to 35% of all PPC ad campaigns.
A recently launched lawsuit alleges that Google is aware of the magnitude of click fraud and does not do enough to alert advertisers of the problem.
The class action suit launched by Click Defence says that "Google has an inherent conflict of interest in preventing click fraud since it derives the same amount of income from each fraudulent click as it does from each legitimate click."
The $10 million lawsuit quotes Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes as saying that click fraud is “the biggest threat to the Internet economy.”
Click Defense is a Colorado company specializing in click fraud detection. They claim that they themselves became a victim of click fraud when they advertised with Google’s Adwords program this year.
They are seeking damages for breach of contract, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair business practices.
A Google spokesman said that the case is unmerited and that Google will defend itself “vigorously.”
About the author:
Copyright 2005 by Ross MacIver
This article may be redistributed freely on the Internet or in ezines as long as the resource box and hyperlinks remain intact.
Ross MacIver is the director of Best Online Content. We provide quality content for your web site and offer a full range of design and SEO services.
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