Impression Fraud - A Definition

A new term has come onto my personal radar and that is impression fraud. I would like to define this term for readers of this blog.

Impression fraud is a close relative of click fraud, but instead of effecting pay per click advertising budgets, it is effecting advertisers who use pay per impression or CPM as it is also know.

CPM is an abbreviation for cost per thousand impressions where M stands for the Latin term for one thousand. The abbreviation is a throw back to print advertising where the term meant cost per thousands of homes the publication would reach.

In a Google Adwords context it relates to site targeted advertising where you will pay a set amount for one thousand impressions of your ads on a site or type of site your select during ad creation, as opposed to pay per click advertising when an advertiser only pays when the ad is clicked upon.

CPM ads can be text ads, image ads or click to play video ads, and they are generally used when a company is trying to build brand awareness. An example of this could be a car company who has released a new model and they want to pay for repeated image ads to be displayed on a leading car review site which runs adsense advertising.

With impression fraud, content publishers are generating repeated reloads of their website in an effort to increase impressions and thereby generate revenue.

There are doubts whether impression fraud gets past many of the filters used by the search engines.

I hope that helps define impression fraud for you.

---
(AF) Pay Per Click Campaign Analytics from Click Tracks

$1 Billion, the cost of invalid clicks

Google has estimated that invalid clicks cost them $100 million in lost sales per percentage point, they go onto say that the invalid click rate they are seeing is 10%. This equates to a staggering $1 billion in lost revenue.

In an interview for Forbes Shuman Ghosemajumder Google's manager for trust and safety said:

Our invalid clicks rate — the activity rate — has remained in the range of less than 10 percent of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million [U.S.] per year in potential revenue foregone

This figure is comprised of all the clicks that Google's filters intercept and mark as invalid, this type of click will include actual click fraud from bots etc along with things such as reloads which count as a double click.

--

(AF) Click fraud software from Who's Clicking Who

Adwords Click Fraud - Reparation

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part three is how to notify Google, attempt to gain reparation and stop the continued abuse of your ads.

Once you have ascertained that you have a suspected click fraud problem, you need to do two things. Notify Google and then exclude the problem IP addresses.

Google have an on-line form to complete. Their invalid click team will then launch an investigation. The form requests details of the campaign, keywords, details of IP addresses and other information which makes the campaign owner suspicious of click fraud.

Once this has been completed Google will then launch their investigation. Here lies the rub. The investigation is not transparent and companies can not be assured that they will obtain a refund. Techniques for increasing your chance of a refund will be discussed in a later posts.

Once domains committing click fraud against your ad campaign have been identified, it is the best practice to exclude them from accessing your site in future.

From the Adwords campaign manager in the tools section there is a tool called IP exclusion tool. Enter the detected IP addresses and your ads will not be shown to the click fraudsters.
--
(AF) Click fraud software from Click Tracks

Adwords Click Fraud - Detection

Over a number of posts I will be discussing the basics of click fraud. What it is, how to detect it, how to report it back to Google and lastly what Google is doing about click fraud.

Part two is how to detect click fraud.

In short you should suspect click fraud activity if you see a marked increase in clicks but no increase in conversions as a result.

This is a fairly general statement, and needs to be qualified. There may be a legitimate increase in clicks due to the following:

Competitor Activity
Your competition may have stopped running their ads on similar keywords and your campaign and you are picking up their clicks.

Google Network
If your ad has recently been approved to run on the network as a whole over and above search results, you may see an increase in low quality clicks. A second reason for an increase would be if your ad starts running on a high volume site.

Seasonal Changes
If your site sells seasonal products or services, then click through rate will increase at your busy time of the year.

Budget Chnages
If you increase your max cpc or max daily budget then there will be a corresponding increase in traffic. This may not

Ad Relevancy
If you have recently changed your keywords and they have become too general, the corresponding increase in traffic will probably be of low quality and will not generate conversions.

If you can rule out the above items, then it is probably time to accept you have a problem and begin an investigation.

Review your web logs, are your receiving multiple clicks from one IP address. Again this must come with a caveat, certain ISPs mask the real IP addresses of users behind a single address.

Run an account level or campaign level report for invalid clicks and trend this over a few months. Has Google spotted and not charged you for an increasing amount of invalid clicks.

If the answer to the above two areas are yes, then it is time to report this to Google for reparation. This will be covered in the next post.


It should also be added that there are companies supplying a more proactive approach to click fraud detection.

{BLATANT SELF PUBLICITY WARNING}

Our consultancy service provides a click fraud monitoring service which monitors trends and can even automatically notify your PPC provider that reparation is required. For a no obligation discussion about our services and our flat monthly fees contact us.

Click Fraud To-Do List

If you are a pay per click campaign manager, then I would like to ask you to one thing today; run an invalid click report from your Adwords account.

As part of their move to be more transparent Google added this additional metric to campaign and account level reports and it is surprising how many people are not taking advantage of this information.

A quick how to:

Login to your Adwords account and go to the report section. Select campaign or account reports, and select the invalid click check box, run your report as normal.

The result was quite a shock to me, for the small period I selected, there were a total of 324 clicks with the invalid clicks result at 24. This means that a little over 7% of my clicks are invalid.

Please note, these are only the invalid clicks that the Google tools pick up, and since Google keeps their click fraud monitoring techniques a secret we do not know what else may slip through the net.

I am interested to get a view of other peoples click fraud percentage, for those of you who run the report, please post your percentages as comments to this post.

The Four Benefits of Google Awords - Number Four Flexibility

Google constantly talk about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss flexibility.

Google Adwords is a very flexible marketing medium compared to other less dynamic formats such as print. Ad can be created and set to run very quickly, it is estimated that an ad will appear within 15 minutes of its inception.

Following on from the fact ads can be created quickly, there is an unlimited amount of editing, starting and stopping of ads from the campaign management interface on a users account. Once the presses roll with a print ad, there is no changing it.

The last area of flexibility is to do with the placement of an ad. Messages can be run in multiple languages or in a single one, worldwide, in a country, in a state. Adwords is even flexible enough to create ad which only run on computers within a radius of a point of latitude and longitude.

Over four posts, I have detailed the benefits of Adwords of cost, reach, timing and flexibility links to all four posts are shown below

reach
cost
timing
flexibility

---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

Google Offer Free Campaign Optimisation Advice

I'm going to get thrown out of the Guild of Campaign Managers for this post, but here we go anyway.

If you ask the nice people at Adwords central they will review your campaign and make suggestions on how to improve your ROI and ad performance.

What is more they will do it for free, simply fill out an online form and optimisation tips will be returned within 10 working days. It is then up to the campaign manager to implemenet the changes or not. Check out the inside Adwords blog for more details.

There is a small catch, this service is only available to Adwords users in US, Canada and the UK.

Of course if you want to pay for campaign optimisation then contact me, no, I'll get my coat then.
---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

The Four Benefits of Google Adwords - Number Three Timing

Google constantly talk about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss timing.

The timing benefit of Adwords is that ads are displayed when people are actively searhcing or browing for content related to the ads.

As an example if someone is searching for blue widgets and an ad is being run against those keywords, the message will be displayed to the potential customer at the right place at the right time. This greatly increases the chances of a sales conversion.

When compared to offline advertising such as newspapers, there is no way to engage an audience at the crucial time when they are making purchase decisions.
---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

The Four Benefits of Google Adwords - Number Two Cost

Google constantly talks about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss cost.

The cost benefits of adwords are no minimum spend, the advertiser sets a daily budget, the ad publisher sets the cost per click and the availability of free tracking and management tools. All of these areas are detailed below.

The fact there is no minimum spend is very useful to the small or medium sized company dipping their toe into web marketing and at the other exteme it is an excellent tool for large corporations to test out new keywords without having to invest large sums of money into the process. A company can decide to spend five pounds, three dollars of a few euros, find that Adwords is not for them and retreat back to their traditional advertising methods.

The ability to set a daily budget is very important for many advertisers. It allows them to control absolutely what they will spend over a given month. If a company sets their dailhy budget to be $50, the total cost for that month will be the number of days in the month mulitiplied by fifty. Nothing more and probably nothing less as Google will take your underspend for day x and add it to your daily budget for day y.

Using the cost per click model, and advertiser is able to set the value of their advertising. They will only pay the amount they specify. If they value a click at 50 pence then a click will cost no more than 50 pence. It is often the case that Google's technology will reduce the cost of the click to 1 unit above the next competitors bid.

The final cost benefit Google provides are the additional (and in my opinion excellent) tools for tracking namely Analytics. Other companies would charge a premium for these types of services, Ebay jumps to mind for their extended subscription services, but Google gives them away free to improve the quality of the advertising experience.

In conclusion Adwords users have greate control over the cost of their campaigns, something usually not true with other forms of advertising.
---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

What is Click Through Rate?

Click through rate or CTR is a metric used within an Adwods campaign to show how effective an ad is. CTR is defined in the following manner

numbers of clicks / number of impressions as a percentage

For example if your ad has 44 clicks and has been displayed 2500 time on Google and it's associated properties then your CTR is 0.02%

The higher the CTR rate, the better performing your ad is.

---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

Adwords Click Fraud - Part One Definition

This post has been moved to our dedicated click fraud blog fraudulent-clicks.com

The Four Benefits of Google Adwords - Number One Reach

Google constantly talk about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss reach.

When Google talks about reach it is talking about the huge numnber of internet users which are potentially exposed to Google or Google affiliated sites which display ads.

The most obvious place where ads are shown is on the right hand site of a search result under the sponsored links heading, but ads are also shown on other Google properties such as Froogle and the hugley popular Gmail web based email system which shows ads in contecxt to the messages you are reading.

The second area where ads are run is on the sites which use Google as their search provider. Companies such as AOL and NTL have contracted Google to supply search results and sponsored links on their main sites. These

The last area where ads are run is on third party content sites which have signed up for Google Adsense product. These sites are known as content publishers and include small scales bloggers (such as this site, see the ads at the top of the page) to large well know publications such as the New York Times. The Google system analyses the pages and displayed ad in context to the content of the web page. For example an article in the NYT about a new greener car may show ads on hybrid cars next to it.

It is estimated that 80% of the internet audience is exposed to Adwords ads in over 100 languages in countries around the world.

This is the huge reach that Adwords can bring to advertisers large or small.

In the next post I will discuss cost.
---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

Harnessing The Power of Multi-Language Adword Campaigns

One of my clients works in a multi language environment and I would like to discuss the benefits of a multi language adwords campaign.

The client in question is a recruiment agency supplying staff from Eastern European countries and in particular Polish staff to companies in the UK. Poland has recenly become a member of the European Union and as a result Poles are legally allowed to work in any of the member states without restriction. The benefit of employing Polish or other eastern european staff is that their cost of living and consequently their wage demands are usual less than their similarly skilled colleagues from Britain.

My client is able to harness the reach of Google in multi languages by creating ads in polish for display on Google.pl wbich connects to their multi language website. From there they could register their curriculum vitae (resume) and hopefully be matched up to positions in the UK.

Using Google's unique world wide reach companies in one country can very easily connect to other companies or in this case potential employees from a different country.
---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager to create a region or country specific campaign then contact me

New product to monitor your trademark in Adwords

I stumbled across a product new to me which adds an interesting dimension to the monitoring of large companies trademarks in Adwords ads.

The protection of trademarked items in Adwords is a hot topic. This was highlighted by a major legal battle between Geico and Google where Geico claimed that Google was infringeing trademarked items by allowing other companies to bid on the word trademark Geico and Geico Direct.

Geico is a well respected car insurance company supplying policies to public sector emloyees in the US. It found that other insurnace companies were bidding on it's trademarks and as a result taking business from them.

They took the case to court in an effort to sue Google for their losses.

Google won the case, but in the aftermath of this, new trademark infringement policies were put in place. If you find someone running ads which are not approved by you as the trademark holder you must notify Google, the ad will be reviewed and pulled if applicable.

The new system from AdsGooRoo automatically scans ads for your trademarked item and produces daily reports and even automated reporting to Google of the problem.

The blurb from their site states:

AdGooroo Tademark Monitoring(TM) finds those advertisers who are bidding on or incorporating your trademarks in their ad copy. Daily alerts, executive summaries and eauotmated complaint forms save your time and mony. Protecing your company's brand name has never been easier.

If your are interested in protecting your trademarks in Adwords, why not check out their product at www.adgooroo.com

---

Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact me

Google Radio Ads

Google are currently in the test phase of an extension to the Adwords system. The new system is Google for Radio Ads.

A group of users from the United States have been selected to participate in the user test phase to iron out any problems before a wider beta test programme is rolled out.

Details are scare at the moment, but Radio ads are controlled from the usual adwords account, where ads are created and distributed with metrics on how the ad is performing. Users target their ads by selecting appropriate radio stations for their ads to run on. Information on whether Google provide voice talent is unknown at the moment, but I will monitor the programme and report back as it matures.

This new phase of Google's expanions is powered by the aquisition of a company called dMarc Advertising who's platform to place radio ads and the technology for them to be broadcast was already at an advanced stage.

My opinion on this is that Adwords is developing into a multi media advertising solution. Added to Google Print Ads I can see companies turning to their Adwords account as their first stop for all advertising needs.
---
Need a Google Adwords campaign manager then contact us>>

Google Adwords Myths

With my consulting work I hear a number of untruths about the Google Adwords system Here are the top ones and my reply to them.

It is very expensive.
It can be as expensive or cheap as you like depending upon your daily budget, cost per click and the quality and effectiveness of the keywords you select. An example of this would be a daily budget of £2.50 with a highly targeted keyword costing 5p per click. This would return 50 leads. as this is highly targetted, they would be qualified leads.

I don't sell world wide, why would I advertise on the web?
Adwords can be targeted to countries, locations, even to a radius around a geographic location. I have run one ad which is centred around the post code of my office for a 25 mile radious, That is how targted it can be.

Adwords is only for big business.
Rubish. Adwords gives small businesss the same benefits as a large budget ad campaign run by multi national corporations. The reach of Google is empowering small businesses rather than big businesses.

It takes too long to get an ad on the system
Once your ad has been created it takes approx. 15 mintues to start running on the Google system.


Hope that clears up a couple of myths.