Nothing burns me more when people try to rip off other people on the Internet. So you can imagine my feeling when I discovered a fraud ring on our pay-per-click (PPC) search engine BulletBid.com.
Thankfully the software we are using has built in fraud indicators and after going through the logs and databases, we were able to catch the perpetrators.
Here is how their scam worked:
A number of individuals would sign up as affiliates, with each having a unique web site. They would then go to each other’s web sites and started clicking on advertisers and getting a percentage of the click-thru rate. We track this type of activity to protect our advertisers from having their accounts depleted.
Since we don't have a huge number of affiliates such as an Overture.com or Sprinks.com, we can easily track the activity of our affiliates and the fraud protection built into the software dramatically helps us find dishonest affiliates.
But this whole incident made me think long and hard at the way a lot of pay-per-click search engines have set up their affiliate programs.
A lot of pay-per-click search engines will pay their affiliates a percentage of the bid amount on a clicked keyword.
For example, let’s say you sign up as an affiliate for a pay-per-click search engine that has this type of affiliate commission set up. This means that if a visitor you send to their search engine, clicks on a link that cost the advertiser $1.00, you would get a percentage of that bid. This could range anywhere from 10% to 70% depending on the pay-per-click search engine.
With keywords being bidded as high as $2-$3 on major PPC search engines, you can see it wouldn't take long for an affiliate to be able to rack up nice commissions by clicking an a variety of bidded links. To make matters worse, he could send his friends (each with their own unique IP address) through his affiliate link to click on a few more highly bidded keywords.
As an advertiser, I would be gravely concerned.
I advertised on many PPC search engines in the last few months and watched my accounts deplete dramatically with very few sales. I knew something was wrong because I had already calculated the conversion ratio from visitors to sales for my products.
The traffic that was coming from these PPC search engines were converting at ridiculously low rates and some were not even converting the prospects into sales at all.
Something smelled fishy.
If a pay-per-click search engine does not have any fraud protection in place, you could lose a serious amount of advertising dollars! If a PPC search engine has *thousands* of affiliates, how can they track the activities of every single affiliate?
Gauher's Quick List On How To Protect Yourself:
* First of all, you
cannot trust anyone but yourself. If you
are going
to advertise on a PPC search engine, you should
monitor your
logs for the IP addresses that the visitors are
coming from.
You can immediately determine fraud if a number
if clicks
are coming from the same IP address.
* If an PPC search
engine is bringing you traffic and no sales,
check to
see if they have a lucrative affiliate program. If
that is the
case, I smell fraud. Contact them to a least
indicate
something is wrong. Once again, check your logs.
* Contact you competitor.
Don't be shy. Ask them about the
quality of
traffic they are receiving from that PPC search
engine.
If they indicate that the PPC search engine is
providing
poor quality for them also, this could indicate
fraud and
not your sales copy.
Pay-per-click advertising is a *powerful* tool to bring targeted traffic to your web site, but if the PPC search engine doesn't have any fraud protection in place, you could be having your advertising dollars stolen right from under your feet.
If you run a PPC
search engine, don't let affiliate tricks you into thinking that they are
sending you legitimate traffic.
Want to read more
of my articles?
Then go to: http://www.freecoolcash.com/articles
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Gauher Chaudhry
is editor of Cool Cash Ezine. You can subscribe
by sending an email
to subscribe@freecoolcash.com with "sub-art"
in the subject.
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