Ads Click Fraud Services!

Check out this bid on rentacoder.com!

click on few ads (bidid is 693642 in case the url changes in the future).

The buyer’s description of the service is

“one of my client have few ads on his website, and i need someone to click on those ads on his website.

please mention how many clicks can you make in 1 day and also, will you differnet ips?

thanks

Note: i will select the coder in few hrs, i need this done by 31st May 2007. so only bid for this period.”

And the max accepted bid price is $10.0

So, even if Google and Yahoo! come up with very smart ways to nail down the click frauds, how will this type of procured fraud services be really solved? Beats me!

Should a Page be Optimized for Ads?

Click fraud is not good for advertising industry. Even more so for companies like Google. With good fraud detection systems in place (and expect them to get better with time), it’s always a good idea to rely on organic traffic and click-throughs than attempting any sort of fraudulent activities.

So, is optimizing a page to increase click through rate a fraud? Personally I don’t think so, but I don’t have really have much data to back this up. But here is my thought process. Much of the time, end users avoid ads, even the contextual ones. This happens for various reasons including but not limited to lack of time and bad opinion about ads.

Still, the companies doing serious business (whatever it may be), are perhaps not getting enough traffic and may not be maxing out their advertising budget. Ofcourse, it may depend on the type of business and target context. But in general, this is probably true.

So, in such cases, is a well-integrated ad space into the surrounding context bad? Perhaps not. This is especially so far brand advertising. The additional CTR achieved by a well integrated ad space with the rest of the page benefits both the publisher and also the advertiser.

Anyone having numbers/experience proving to be otherwise, please comment.

Is Google AdWords Really Effective?

If it’s working for you, then just great. Move on. If it’s not, read on.

I recently read a forum post by a person who gave some statistics of her site (I don’t want to give the name of this person or her site to protect the identity). Per that post, she averages about $400 a month being an Amazon Affiliate. If you are an affiliate you would know how lucky you got to be to make that kind of money per month! I mean, at about 8% commission, that translates to selling about $5000 worth of stuff.

Then, she mentioned her AdSense profit. Take a moment and guess how much it is. I will tell you in a moment.

Google has a referral plan. You can see their referral fee at

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=25889

Referral fee, unlike cost-per-click, is paid only if the person who clicked it actually takes an action. If AdSense itself is really that effective, why would Google choose to go with a referral program (cost per action) and not with the CPC?

Now back to the amount the woman makes per month through Google AdSense. It’s $7000.00. Yes, that’s right. It’s a whopping seven thousand dollars. Obviously depending on traffic a website can make even more. The number $7000.0 alone by itself would have been meaningless. What makes this information important and interesting is the fact that it can be compared against the money made from Amazon affiliate program.

Whether you are advertising on the Google’s network (AdSense) or on the Search Results, it probably doesn’t matter (though, it would be nice if there are any statistics on how good the conversion rate is with one vs the other). If it’s not working out good for you, you should try out the cost-per-action option. When doing CPA, you should do this through Google or any other search engine, as well as offering your own affiliate program (ofcourse, be honest and don’t screw your promoters).

If you have any statistics that compare two different revenue streams or customer acquisition channels, feel free to post here to help others make better decisions.

Link Farms & PageRank Penalization

Advertising will definitely increase traffic, but at a cost. So, organic growth in traffic through search engines is obviously the holy grail for most web sites. But that requires a good PageRank to show up in the top of the search results. Since getting a good page rank is difficult, people have resorted to various tricks. One of them is buying links in a link farm, link directory or whatever you call it. Apparently, Google has chosen to penalize websites for this. I don’t have a problem with that. But is that the right thing to do? The reason why I am concerned with the penalization of PageRank by Google, instead of coming up with a better algorithm is, what if a competitor keeps spaming your site into these link farms?