“Your Recent Ad History”

Click fraud is increasing day by day. Or atleast the awareness of what click fraud is, or how prevalant it is, or the lack of transparency by the big search engines on what they are doing to prevent these click frauds. This recent article on BusinessWeek is elaborate and provides a lot of information in this area

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003001.htm

One reader’s comment is

“While click fraud is a problem, I believe the bigger problem for advertisers is the unreasonable time frame in which a repeat click from the same user charged to your account. For example, if someone clicks on your ad, then 2 minutes later again, then 5 minutes later again, then 1 minute later again–you get billed for 4 clicks. If you complain to Google, you get the canned “Comparison Shopping” e-mail. So while you may be getting clicked on by legitimate buyers, you may be paying several times in one session for the same visitor to come to your site, making it very hard to calculate costs of PPC advertising. I would like to see a timeframe that is at least reasonable for repeat clickers who are “comparison shopping.”"

Sometimes you go to Amazon you may not find what you want till you do a couple of searches. However, with each search, it shows “Your Recent History” which contains links to the previously conducted searches.

So, why can’t the same be done for the ads too? That is, once a user clicks an ad, then have a section to show the recently clicked ads? So that, if the user wants to just get back to the previously clicked ad, he would directly click on the link in the “Your Recent Ad History”?

It is important for companies like Google and Yahoo! to realize that their primary source of income is online advertising and make sure they take every possible measure to gain the confidence of the advertisers. Sending the canned “Comparison Shopping” email doesn’t cut it! Common, there are supposed to be really very smart guys, PhD from Stanford and what not, guys working in these companies. It would be a shame if these guys just send out such canned queries and not really think of creative and innovative solutions. Sure, they don’t want to disclose their algorithms on fraud detection, but atleast be sure to come up with solutions that are visible and change the perception.

aStore by Amazon.com lets you build a store of your own!

Amazon definitely is coming up with a lot of interesting features and aStore is my resent exploration of these features. I just built a store and named it Books for the Web Application Developers. The whole excercise building this customized store didn’t take more than a few minutes.

Tribute to the crocodile hunter

This is the show I am currently watching on the TV and did a search for “crocodile hunter”. And here is the ad I noticed on Google.

Crocodile Hunter Dies
www.thefirstpost.co.uk Khaki clad Aussie legend Steve Irwin remembered

Is it appropriate to try to advertise making use of an unfortunate event? Comments from the readers are welcome.

Manufacturers, Retailers and the Mom & Pop stores of the Information Age

Manufacturers – Content Publishers, who produce Information
Consumers – Advertisers who want to use that content to reach out as many audience as possible
Retailers – Companies like Google and Yahoo!, who makes money for Manufacturers by selling Consumers

So, in the Information Age, who are the Mom & Pop stores of Information? Those who produce very specialized content for a particular set of audience can choose to make more money from the ads, without paying to the middleman, with simple text ad scripts that doesn’t cost much. So, instead of giving away 50% or more of the generated ad revenue to someone else, it’s possible to keep all the money with you. Ofcourse, the biggest problem, as with any mom&pop business is, to get the advertisers, your consumers, to pay you directly. Just like inspite of the Walmarts and Amazons, there are still plenty of Mom&Pop stores surviving with their specialized products and intimate knowledge of their clientele, the model may be extended to the Information age as well.

Omakase, a competitor to AdSense?

Amazon recently introduced what it calls Omakase links. BTW, Omakase, a Japanese word stands for “entrust”. Essentially, you are trusing Amazon.com to put whichever product ads it wants based on the content on your website. This is going to make it lot more easier for the small publishers as otherwise, it would require building the links manually and putting them on the website. I recently had an idea and was just hoping for Amazon to provide this type of a feature. With a potential to get up to 8% on referral, the chance of making money through Omakase is more but unlike AdSense which pays you purely based on click-through, Omakase will be paid based on the conversion rate. That is, in addition to the click-through, the actual transaction has to happen.

Text-Link-Ads, another Keyword Ads Alternative

I have been constantly look for various text ad alternatives. Today, I came across text-link-ads.com where you can Buy/Sell Ad Links. I found their link calculator to be a very interesting. Not sure what algorithm they use to find the “worth” of your site, but the user interface is what I liked. You can pick the section of the page where you want to display the ad and the amount changes based on that (it may not change much if your site can’t fetch you more than a handful of dollars though!).

Don’t spend for ads during server downtime

I just happened to search for the keyword foreclosure on Google and noticed the ad from http://www.hudhomesnow.com/ . I clicked the ad and I was redirected to hudhomesnow.com’s website. But I am getting “Server Not Found” error. Perhaps, their site is going through an upgrade or something. Now the question is, will Google charge for this click through? I don’t know the answer but my guess is yes. This is because, all Google does when you click on the ad is to record the fact that the user clicked so and so ad (using this it charges the advertiser) and then just redirect the browser to the landing page of the ad. Now, it’s after this redirect to the landing page, that the “server not found” error will be detected by the browser and this will not be known to Google.

So, it’s very important for companies to turn off advertising when going through a server downtime.