AD TRACKING -  PPC - CLICK FRAUD

Pay Per Click, PPC , Pay Per Acquisition, everyone's doing it. From Google to Yahoo and back again, Pay Per Click advertising is the biggest thing in online advertising. Each year there are millions of dollars being spent on PPC advertising campaigns and it will only get bigger in the coming years.

Are you sure about the clicks the publishers and search engines are reporting? Having worked for an ad agency all these years as a media buyer and interactive media consultant I have seen some very contrary reporting than what the actual counts are. By using a third-party tracking program with special tracking URL's it's relatively inexpensive to keep tabs on your ads and make sure the publishers are not blanket charging you for clicks that aren't yours or even worse, fraudulent clicks. Best of all it gives you the data to determine your ad's effectiveness and sales conversions.

Do you really know who  is clicking your ads? Be sure with Who's Click Who

IS CLICK FRAUD THAT BIG OF A PROBLEM

 Click Fraud is a huge problem! Google recently called click fraud "the single biggest threat" to their business model!"

Don't the search engines track fraudulent clicks? Sort of. The search engines do try to track fraudulent clicks, but from what we have seen their controls are not terribly strict. If someone clicks on your ad 5 times in 20 seconds, you probably won't be charged for all 5 clicks. BUT, if someone clicks on your ads once or twice per day for a month or across several search engines, our experience has shown that you will probably be charged for nearly every single click and you will have to provide detailed server logs with the alleged fraudulent activity highlighted to even be considered for a credit to your account.

Buying PPC ads in online yellow page sites? Make sure you understand exactly what counts as a click in your service agreement. Different publishers may charge for a click that is simply a map to your facility. This hardly qualifies as a "lead" since the user might have accidentally clicked on the map instead of a web link and we all have clicked for driving directions in the past that were much less than accurate....that's why you need WhosClickingWho?

Is there any way to stop these kinds of fraudulent click activities? Well nothing is 100% perfect on most of these PPC models, but I think a good start to deter fraudulent clicks is to let abusers  know you are onto them with a simple program designed to alert the "clicker" that they are being monitored and their IP Address is being recorded by you as in the sample here or a more subtle message example could be like this. 

And since it doesn't use a traditional pop-up window, no pop-up blockers can stop it from displaying. WhosClickingWho? will work with all the major players in the PPC arena like Google and Overture and many others - check the FAQ on their website to see any limitations of the product.

Click Fraud isn't the way to beat your competitors, it costs everyone more in the end and we don't think this is right. Additionally, if someone is clicking across multiple search engines in order to hide their fraud, WhosClickingWho? will detect this!

OTHER ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT TRACKING TOOLS