Bill was getting frustrated and more than a little desperate. He’d being trying to promote his website for months with little or no success.

Adwords didn’t seem to be working. He’d devised the most fiendish ads he could think of and set them up on Google only to find that nobody clicked on them.

He had written several articles and, using an automatic article submitter, had placed them on hundreds of Article Barns across the web. There had been an increase in his Alexa Ratings, but that was it. Maybe there was a slight flurry of hits when he first placed the article, then nothing.

He’d set up a blog, made a press release announcement, and done everything except don an Shaman costume and dance around his computer.

He’d purchased ebooks on increasing his traffic, and tried every idea he ran across. His budget was beginning to show the effects, and he had the chilling realization that if he didn’t come across something that worked, he was simply going to run out of money and go bankrupt.

In other words, he was about to become one of the 90 per cent of Informational Marketers on the web who fail.

That was when he ran across a site that guaranteed traffic. Little did Bill know he was about to become a victim of click fraud.

CLICK FRAUD AND BIG BUSINESS

Click fraud has been discussed in a recent issue of Newsweek (Oct 6, 2006) and across the web as one of the most serious issues that faces online advertising. It has cast doubt on at least some of the efficacy of services such as Google Adwords to bring actual paying customers to a business website.

It began with the monitoring of clicks that appeared to be coming from outlying countries such as Botswana and Syria, and grew into the discovery of a scourge that threatens to undo the very concept of paying for clicks as a way of obtaining legitimate customers.

Whole cultures were discovered that sustained themselves by clicking on ads – “paid to read” rings consisting of hundreds of thousands of people who do nothing but click on sites.

Newsweek reports that Yahoo and Google claim they “filter out” clicks of dubious origin, but the credibility of pay for click advertising is beginning to be undermined. It’s estimated that 10% to 15% of all clicks are fake. 300 to 500 million dollars of advertising revenue are being funneled into the click fraud industry.

THE “VISITORS” COME FLOWING IN

Bill was seriously considering paying for “guaranteed targeted visitors”. For as little as $100 he could get this kind of traffic directed to his site. After months of frustration in building his customer base he pulled out his credit card.

And the clicks began. They started slowly and then gradually mounted. By the time they reached a thousand, Bill knew there was something wrong.

He was getting a lot of clicks, all right, but he was getting no sales. Bill knew from his experiments with Adwords that his site had a 1% “conversion rate”. That is, for every 100 clicks he sold one ebook.

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