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September 01, 2005
First Movers Advantage Tells about his Click Fraud
We are hosting this section of the web site as a courtesy to advertisers who may also be using, or considering, pay per click (PPC) advertising for their own web sites. We have very good experience with some PPC networks and very bad experience with others. The comments below are based on our experience at www.myezmove.com We must stress that none of the networks listed here have engaged directly in click fraud on their own. Instead, some networks fail to address the issue and allow unscrupulous web publishers to engage in click fraud via their networks.We experienced click fraud from the start with this network. As a matter of fact, we could only find two possibly legitimate visitors from this source. Even then, the referring URLs were fakes, so we question the validity of those visitors. There are several illegitimate 'search engines' that carry ads from this network. These illegitimate sites engage in massive click fraud and Enhance fails to stop their fraudulent activity. Click here for more details on our experience with this PPC network. Our opinion: Stay away until Enhance cleans up its network.
ePilot:
We experienced click fraud from the start with this network. As a matter of fact, we could only find one possibly legitimate visitor from this source. There are several illegitimate 'search engines' that carry ads from this network. These illegitimate sites engage in massive click fraud and ePilot fails to stop their fraudulent activity. Click here for more details on our experience with this PPC network. Our opinion: Stay away until ePilot cleans up its network.
Google:
We are told that there may be a small percentage of fraudulent traffic coming through Google, but we have not been able to find any. We believe that Google is doing a good job of controlling click fraud. Our opinion: This is a high quality network.
Kanoodle:
We experienced click fraud from the start with this network. As a matter of fact, we could not find a single legitimate visitor from this source. There are several illegitimate 'search engines' that carry ads from this network. These illegitimate sites engage in massive click fraud and Kanoodle fails to stop their fraudulent activity. Click here for more details on our experience with this PPC network. Our opinion: Proceed with caution.
Follow-up: A representative from Kanoodle called to say that they wanted to keep my business and would work to make things right. He promised to change the traffic that was coming to my site. He was very friendly, so he will get that chance. We will post another follow-up after they make changes.
Follow-up (continued): Kanoodle gave me a credit for bad clicks and 'optimized' my account. I do not know what they did to 'optimize' the account, but we have the account in trial right now. We will post results as soon as we get them.
Lycos InSite:
We are not seeing any blatant click fraud from InSite. Of note, however, is that most of their traffic so far is referred to us by 'abcsearch', one of their network affiliates. This is interesting because we identified abcsearch as a possible fraud farm in other PPC networks. InSite appears to be able to filter out the fraudulent clicks from abcsearch -- the traffic we are getting appears to be legitimate. We will continue to monitor this network until we are convinced that the traffic is legitimate. Our Opinion: Proceed with caution.
Miva:
We are told that there may be a small percentage of fraudulent traffic coming through Miva, but we have not been able to find any. We believe that Miva is doing a good job of controlling click fraud. Our opinion: This is a high quality network.
Search123:
We experienced click fraud from the start with this network. As a matter of fact, we could not find a single legitimate visitor from this source. There are several illegitimate 'search engines' that carry ads from this network. These illegitimate sites engage in massive click fraud and Search123 fails to stop their fraudulent activity. Click here for more details on our experience with this PPC network. Our opinion: Stay away until Search123 cleans up its network.
•Yahoo!:
We are told that there may be a small percentage of fraudulent traffic coming through Yahoo!, but we have not been able to find any. We believe that Yahoo! is doing a good job of controlling click fraud. Our opinion: This is a high quality network.
Posted by Hans A. Koch at September 1, 2005 07:29 PM

