I am surprised that PPC Fraud does not get more attention. Have we all resigned ourselves to accepting it as the cost of doing business? Yet, each day it eats away our profits and advertising budget taking us off line and making our ads unavailable to legitimate buyers!

Google and Yahoo have no real incentive to correct this problem. It generates massive amounts of revenue for their companies every day!

Notice the Search Engines are offering the New Local Search, which has the ability to filter traffic that pertains only to a small business area. However, they do not offer the ability to limit foreign traffic from your site! Why is that? Because they are aware that many of the Fraudulent PPC come form other countries and do not want to lose that revenue!

Any site whose only purpose is to generate revenue from advertising should be suspicious!

Take notice of Shopping Directory Sites whose only content is PPC Ads appearing in your website statistics. Many have the same IP Address but use several different Domain Names through Masking techniques to avoid detection! Most of these sites cannot be found in a search on any Engine. So where does this traffic come from? Do they have their own Pay Per Read network? Do they have their own Spy Bot Network?

Why would the Search Engines sign up such sites to carry our ads anyway? Again, they are counting on our ignorance and will accept the few claims made by advertisers who do the research and make the claim. This is peanuts compared to the revenue these sites generate for the Search Engines!


I encourage every Advertiser to write to Google and Yahoo though your advertising control panel insisting that they make following changes:

1. Ability to Opt Out of Advertising on Foreign Domains.

2. Ability to Opt Out of Sites whose only Content is PPC Advertising.

3. Ability to Filter PPC visitors outside your area of business.

It is my belief that these changes would go a long way in fighting PPC Fraud. They are changes that the Search Engines have the ability to make but WILL NOT without pressure from the Advertisers.

This problem will only get bigger unless we act together.

These are my thoughts - What are yours?

Nice eye opening post Scout.
My view on the PPS crap, is to stay the heck away from it altogether, and spend our money on smarter alternative ways of advertising.

Best forum post I have read in years.

What are some of those "smarter alternatives"? While I have had luck with some targeted banner ads, every other method seems to be just another way of throwing money down the crapper.

Why would they?.. the cash still flows for them...

We used adwatcher for 4 months. Pretty good program, just dropped it though, we were not getting to many fraudulent clicks. You can test drive it for 30 days at http://www.adwatcher.com

If you stick with their core sponsored search and opt out of content ads you can cut way down on bad clicks. As I said before, click fraud really only hurts the search engines since in a competitive marketplace the less favorable price/value ratios will drive down the cost per click for those search terms where fraud is occuring. This is basic economics that apparently many don't grasp (like why gas prices have increased).

I disagree. A few months ago MSN dropped my site from the index and I had no choice but to use a PPC program. I think it is how you set up the PPC determines the number of click fraud you receive. For example if you use a single word as your PPC then, yes you will get click fraud. With my site, I used 4 and 5 word search phrases... it makes it much more difficult for the bots to generate fraudulent clicks. If you put your search phrase in () then that exact search much be used before you ad will display.

With MSN, I was have my daily budget set for $500 and in reality, the clicks I was receiving cost me less than $10 per day. The conversion rates so far has been very high because each phrase is linked to the page that sells that item, not to my homepage.

Now that MSN is indexing my site again, I will not have to rely on my PPC for all of my sales. Will I terminate my PPC? No, but it will be reduced and still play a small part in my advertising budget.

great post. I agree 100% PPC fraud is a HUGE problem. My business is completely online. After opening my site and I received the promotional Ad word credits I assumed I was well on my way to sales. I was DEAD wrong. 90% of my traffic was coming from the Ad words but I was receiving 0 sales. After looking at my traffic stats I noticed the majority of my visits are JUNK hits. Everything you wrote goes right in line with what happened to me. I drastically reduced my Ad word spending a few days ago. At the end of this month I will completely turn it off. Only major companies benefit from Ad words. I was speaking to a SE marketer a few days ago and he confirmed this. Major site can bid $5 per click, they have massive advertising budgets and as long as they get the name out they don’t care. The people that feel it are the small business owners who are all victims of the current PPC system. We are all better off spending on optimization and increasing our organic visits. Organic visits come from people who want a specific thing. PPC has a higher tendency to be shown to people who arent looking for your products / services then when click schemes make it seem like your site is being found Google reduced the # of times your site is show in order to not exceed your preset budget

Taj, first off, welcome to the forums.

I disagree with you, PPC Fraud is not a huge problem. Don't guage PPC worthiness off of the credit you spent from . It takes more than $100 to understand PPC. You can read all you want, and do so, but you need to spend money to make money and to learn. We aren't there yet, and we have spent thousands. If I thought we were there, we would fail. Don't ever think you have it all figured out, being in the tech business for more than a decade, I can tell you that as soon as you figure it out, you have to refigure it, because it changes.

You can tell the PPC programs to not display your ads in certain geographic areas, you can set budgets, you don't have to bid $5 a keyword, you don't have to use keywords that are not relavant to what you are selling. As far as sales go, if you get clicks and you know what page these people are looking at your site, and they don't buy, you have to start to wonder if your price is right, your page is right, the page is relevant to the keyword or content of the ad that was clicked on, etc. . .

There are many factors that go into successful PPC, to just blanket say that PPC doesn't work is inaccurate. You (third person) just haven't figured it out yet, and it is a lot easier to say, "It doesn't work for us" and quit than it is to actually sit down and figure it out until it works for your site.

PPC is slated to be replaced by PPA (Pay Per Action). Basically the same, but you don't pay for someone just hitting your PPC add (or PPA add, as it is). Instead, you pay if they do something on your site. Such as buy, which would be a good thing.



Link to G's Blog on PPA

Now thats what I am talking about. Thanks for the link.