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September 27, 2006
Click fraud growing on the Web
A year ago, DiamondHarmony.com, an online jewelry store, decided that it had outgrown its sole source of advertising, which was eBay.
The company added an elaborate marketing effort on search engines that included a pay-per-click advertising campaign based on keywords and phrases. For its trouble, DiamondHarmonyDiamondHarmony became ensnared in click fraud.
Instead of actual prospects, the clicks were coming from fraudulent sources. The fraud, which cost DiamondHarmony $17,000 over seven months, was uncovered through analytical software the company installed from ClickTracks of Santa Cruz, Calif.
Posted by dj at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
The dark side of online advertising
Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising. He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO )and Google Inc. (GOOG ) a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when prospective customers click on your ads.
Posted by dj at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2006
Google CEO clicks ads 'all the time,' are his clicks marked 'invalid'?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently revealed that he clicks on Google ads "all the time." Asked at the Search Engine Strategies Conference earlier this month "When was the last time you clicked on an ad, and why, at Google?" Schmidt acknowledged:
I do it all the time, probably because I want to make sure that everything was working.
Are such evaluation clicks by the Google CEO registered by Google as "invalid clicks" and filtered out before advertisers are billed? Or, are Google advertisers charged for a click each time Schmidt clicks on a Google ad under the guise of making sure that "everything was working?"
Posted by dj at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
