Click Fraud is an issue that has been a conversational topic and issue in the search industry and at SES conferences for several years. Search engines have made major changes to their systems of checks and balances in order to ameliorate fraudulent clicks. After all, why perpetuate an issue that seriously devalues your own product? In the end, however, it comes down to a basic situation that is common to every business and division of government extant in America, do people really trust you to tell the whole truth about your internal processes?

The definition of Click Fraud has expanded from that of intentionally fraudulent clicks to that of unwanted clicks or clicks of no value. In general, categories of unwanted traffic encompass the following categories:

• Fraudulent – Designed to make someone else money at the expense of your campaign
• Fraudulent – Designed to make a competitor’s campaign use their budget at a higher rate
• Unwanted – Clicks to your site by a competitor, a vendor or your own people
• Unwanted – Clicks from a country where you do not have a sales presence
• Unwanted – Clicks generated by faulty engine spiders or marketing bots
• Unwanted – Duplicated clicks generated as part of a shopping comparison

All of these clicks can be measured and detected and a case made that they are not part of a normal search campaign, and as such, should not be billed by the search engines. To a great extent, the engines claim that they do everything possible to prevent these activities from occurring, but, how can anyone be certain of this? Analysts have stated that fraudulent and unwanted clicks can be as little as 6% or as much as 17% of a search campaign, depending upon the industry vertical concerned. When you consider that the top four engines had a projected income from advertising of $10 billion dollars in 2006, it becomes increasingly obvious that a third party solution was inevitable and desired.

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Last week, Google moved its Real Time Quality Score (RTQS) testing out of beta and launched it live for all AdWords advertisers.  RTQS allows for Google’s algorithm to calculate Quality Score (QS) on the fly each time a search is conducted.  Previously, the Quality Score was not calculated in Real Time, but over a period of time.

When I first heard about the rolling out of this update to the calculation of Quality Score, I was hopeful it would be beneficial to both searchers and advertisers alike.  For searchers, it would allow for instant determination by Google’s system to serve up the most relevant query results.  Thus, in theory, giving searchers exactly what they are looking for each and every time they search.  For advertisers, I was crossing my fingers we would also see a lower cost-per-click (CPC) since our ads should be showing in higher positions when they are more relevant, with an increased QS to help boost them up there.  Also, since results being served will be real-time relevant to what the searchers are looking for, that should then mean advertisers will see more qualified traffic, creating more clicks, a higher click-through rate (CTR), and a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

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This post has the objective of evoking more questions and comments than answers!

I am a dedicated and active supporter of social media both personally and professionally. However recently, I had reason to pause when I received a friend request to my Facebook page by a favorite client. A customer wants to be my friend? If I accept, will he view all the photos of me and my dog and think my obsessions are a little strange? If I don’t accept, surely he would be insulted? What would happen when I advise “not available to work on Monday”, but then he views my recently posted photos of my golf long- weekend? My conundrum lasted only a few minutes, he is a great client, we have common interests outside of our work lives and I realized he was the kind of person I would be a friend with anyway!

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In times of crisis, people look to authority figures for crisis-specific information. In an election year, every crisis is spun by authority figures as a campaign issue. People are more apt to try to find a neutral source of information regarding issues that concern them. More often than not, people turn to the internet to conduct their research. When they lack a pre-selected source of news, blogs or comments, they turn to search.

People in the age of online information expect fast, quick access to the information they need. We have created that expectation in an age of instant information, instant access to news, instant access to stock portfolios.

People are apt to take fast quick action on information, bombarded as they are with media “breaking news” of doom and gloom on television, newspapers and yes, on the internet. (Remember, media’s job is to get you to watch, listen to or read more media, that’s how they get their paychecks.

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When creating a search campaign, you want to make sure you have the right recipe for success: a bowl of targeted keywords mixed with a pinch of catchy ads makes a great search campaign recipe. But what happens when someone does a search query that has nothing to do with your campaign and your ad shows up? This calls for a negative match keyword list.

A negative keyword list is a list of words you enter into your search campaign so your ad won’t appear for that particular search query. For example, if your brand is V8 Juice, you would have “engine” as a negative, so when someone searches for “V8 engines,” your ad will not appear.

There has been debate on whether adding negative terms could hurt campaigns by limiting the amount of traffic to their respective website. I recommend that if your campaign goal is to only drive traffic, try to limit your negative keyword list so you can get as many impressions as possible. But if your campaign has a conversion goal, a negative keyword list will help maintain quality leads to your site and cut total costs. If you aren’t currently using them in your campaign, don’t be scared. Add a few and monitor; you may see amazing results!

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