I was reading an article one day, that ironically I found while searching through Google for subject matter to write about. I wish I had bookmarked the page, but I didn’t. I do remember the content of the article:

Pay-Per-Click Fraud.

Now, being in and out of PPC advertising off and on as the mood strikes me, the title of the article hit me in the forehead like the snap of a strategically aimed wet towel. I believe I still sport the welt.

The article led you to believe that PPC was not only fraught with fraud, but the fraud was growing at an alarming rate with no controls to keep it in check! I read about instances of Competitors for keywords setting up “farms” of clickers to run out the PPC budgets of smaller businesses, ad copying, hackers using “click bots”, and link spamming. The two giants (Google and Yahoo), who also offer a way for people to earn by placing those same PPC ads on their sites to get paid for each click and cheating abounds! There is no way to stop it or track it! Well, there are ways to track it, but little is being done to stop it. And it will only get worse before it gets better.

The article definitely gave the impression that pay-per-click search engines not only had no effective way to stop click-fraud, but had no INCENTIVE to stop it. It’s money in the bank for them and unless you as the advertiser, are vigilant in closely monitoring and analyzing your traffic (looking for too many clicks from the same domain, for example), you are high and dry with as much as 35%-50% of your traffic possibly being fraudulent! I don’t have time to baby-sit their business, do you?

After reading this article, I went searching for others (after pulling my PPC campaigns) and found the same consensus . . . PPC providers, especially the big guys, really did not, and will not care unless they start losing MANY advertising dollars. One site even estimated as much as $1 billion in click fraud across all search providers combined! Bill Gates could probably afford to lose that much but Google and Yahoo won’t refund that to advertiser/victims.

It was also popular belief that PPC fraud-eliminating technology (if the search engines had any incentive to research it) is way behind the brilliant, bored and malevolent hackers and their motivation to “stick it” to the “man”.

Will Pay-Per-Click die in the throes of key word competition and click bots? Not anytime soon. I can tell you that I, as an advertiser, just can’t wrap my mind around the need to use a marketing method that is that rife with fraud. That’s MY money! There ARE better and more effective ways to make it work for me. PPC is not the only means to accomplish the desired end!

Do not despair. Although the popular and quickly visual advertising method that it is, there is still the good old fashioned site submission. You remember! The FREE ones! Google still takes free listings and many of the popular directories still take free listings and guess what? If you bone-up on keyword phrases and place them strategically on your web site, get some good back links with other web sites with similar keyword concentration, you can STILL get on the first page of the search results! It takes time and there is an art to it, but given some patience, you can benefit two ways . . . Traffic from those sites, and link popularity ranking in the search engines.

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