Are you amongst the crowd that uses pay per click to boost site traffic?
Are you wondering if all the clicks you get charged for are valid?
Have you filed click-fraud complaints with your search engine(s)?

We’d like to shed some insight into the whole pay per click game.

Here are some things to consider when your traffic due to your log files doesn’t add up with the clicks you get charged for:

• How long is the load time of your web pages?
• Your pages might appear to load fast on your local machine, because you have broadband and the images of your site might already be in your cache. But how about a new visitor with a 56k line clicking on a link to your site?
• If your site doesn’t load within 5 seconds you have a perfectly valid click on the one end but almost certainly no visit on your site. Your visitor will simply click away if he/she doesn’t se anything relevant within a few seconds.
• Is your server always fast or does it have a lot of downtime or slow loading times due to other activity on the server or the switches connecting the server with a main Internet backbone?
• It might not be your site that is causing a delay in loading but your server or its connection to the web.
• Are your pages compliant with W3C standards and load correctly with all browsers. Maybe your pages don’t render correctly and you have another source of lost clicks right there.

Before considering click fraud you should definitely take a close look on your end and check all the points above.

If you think your numbers still don’t add up it is time to move to the next step.

Syndication
Keep in mind that all major search engines syndicate their content. Some of the clicks that Google might charge you might not come form Google itself but from some other sites that are showing your ads as part of the feed they receive from Google. Netscape, AOL and Lycos are just some sites that show Google’s paid search results.

All right, you still think something is wrong.

Google is obviously facing a very complicated conflict of interested here. On the one hand every click is revenue for them. That is what Google lives for. Google has just been included in the S&P 500 and has a market cap of around $100 billion. Make no mistake: That is a very hungry machine that needs to feed its shareholders all the time. They need more and more ad revenue all the time.

In order for that well not to dry out they can not allow to be perceived as unfair or cheaters by a widespread audience. Therefore Google makes a lot of reassurances that they address click fraud wherever they spot it and will reimburse you for all your invalid traffic. Unfortunately Google is also highly secretive about all information they do not have to share. So you will always be fishing in the dark. Ditto with all other search engines that place paid listings.

I’d look at it like this:
Do I make money from paid advertising? If yes it is a good thing. If I spend more on ads than I can absolutely verify in sales tied to these ads I would rethink my strategy. The industry occurrence for invalid clicks is about 20 to 30%. You should factor that into you ROI calculations.

Are my keywords best suited for paid ads or am I better of with organic search?
This is a very deep topic but here is a simple thought: If you are marketing a seasonal product or need quick exposure and try to react trends daily you should definitely consider pay per click. For all long term projects, like keywords tied to your core business model, I would recommend organic search engine marketing. It will take longer and will initially cost more $$$ but you’ll get to enjoy the results much longer without the meter running all the time.

One more thought on the lack of accountability:
If you compare PPC with many other, more traditional, forms of advertising it actually doesn’t rate all that bad. You certainly have a much stronger link between cause and effect than with banner or print ads. Some people seems to forget where they where five years ago.

What are my other alternatives?
PPC is not the only way of paid advertising. You could buy pixels on pages similar to the milliondollarhomepage that will get you exposure for a fixed amount. This is all about your skills of finding sites that can provide relevant traffic for you and your negotiating skills with the site operators.

Finally….My take:
Personally I don’t like PPC. PPC can be like steroids in your marketing mix. But to me it feels like paying to get laid. If I have to open my wallet to get something done that almost everyone else gets for free I feel really bad. I know that is very old school but I still believe that creative marketing can do without PPC entirely.