Tim Daly recent article in MediaPost raised this very question. Is Impression Fraud More Dangerous Than Click Fraud? If you would have asked me this a month ago I would have said no. At that time not very many people were talking about it. The more we talk about this the more people will start recognizing this as an option that can be used to attack the competition.

As defined at Wikipedia, “Impression fraud is an insidious variant of click fraud in which the advertiser is penalized for having an unacceptably low click-through rate for a given keyword. This involves making numerous searches for a keyword but without clicking of the ad.”

This devious senario involves two competitors competing head to head. Even if one is a big company and the other is small the playing field is pretty level because this is the internet. Lets say that the smaller company has been writing better ads and has better landing pages and is spending the same amount each month as the large company. The larger company can spend ten times the budget of the smaller company but the landscape just doesn’t allow it. The playing field is leveled, or is it?

Now lets say that the larger company knows a bad month can wipe out the budget for the smaller company and decides to play dirty. The larger company pauses all campaigns for his company and artificially inflates the impressions with some bogus automation tool. The larger company is safe because they, temporarily, pull out of the campaign. Because of Google’s, and now Yahoo Search Panama’s, quality score penalty they will start paying more for a click than they did prior to this event. This will increase their cost per acquisition and possibly cause them to stop the campaign.

You might ask why am I providing all this information. People who have never thought about this have now been provided with an option that they didn’t previously consider. I pondered this very point but decided the best defense is education. Although not fool proof there is at least awareness about click fraud. Enough people are paying attention to click fraud and complaining when they see something out of the ordinary. This is forcing the engines to make appropriate refunds.

For impression fraud awareness can bring this same kind of reaction. If you see a unusual increase in impressions and notice an unusual decrease in click through rates for some keywords then you will know to at least consider this. If your cost per click rises for these keywords you might consider contacting the publisher to file a complaint. If enough of us are doing this the engines will start paying attention and, at least, give this the attention now provided to Click Fraud.

As always these are my thoughts but I look forward to your point of view.

Technorati Tags: Click Fraud, Impression Fraud, Search Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

Pay Per Click | No Comments »

John Jantsch has a great post about the best metrics that small businesses don’t measure. It’s a list that, when we put together a paid search campaign we try very hard to get our clients to use (or at least figure out).

1) Leads - where do they come from, how many, and what generated them - if you don’t know this, it’s likely you are wasting lots of money on things that are not generating leads, or potentially worse, not sticking with a great tactic.
2)Average $ - What’s average amount of business you do with a client - your existing clients want to do more business with you. It’s easy to create an average dollar number and give your attention to creating more opportunities and more profitable clients - this way you can weed out clients that fall below the number eternally.
3)Conversions - How many of those leads turn into clients - the biggest time killer of all for the small business is chasing leads that are not qualified, not educated (by you, not in life), not ready to appreciate your value. When you measure this, you have to fix it, it’s too painful otherwise.

These are especially important if you’re purchasing leads - no matter what your business, it is vital to know as precisely as possible where your customers are coming from, how much they cost to acquire, and the potential profit from them.

Technorati Tags: Small Business Marketing, Lead Generation, Paid Search, Marketing Metrics

Tracking, Analytics, Strategy | No Comments »