Archive for the 'Online Advertising' Category

Click fraud is one of the biggest challenges faced by paid search networks such as Yahoo and Google. It is well known that many of the “get rich through web” schemes are nothing but networks of click fraud groups.

Last month Jeffrey K. Rohrs wrote a blog post titled “The Sausage Manifesto - An open letter” directed at the pay per click advertisers,

Indeed, today’s PPC traffic is very much like sausage-a tasty mystery meat comprised of a variety of high quality ingredients as well as some bits and pieces that the engines would frankly prefer you don’t ask much about. Those bits - invalid clicks, fraudulent clicks, and clicks from search garbatrage are increasingly hitting the radar of advertisers and, quite rightly, they are beginning to ask some pretty meaty questions of Google, Yahoo, and others such as:

* How do you define an invalid (i.e., non-billable) click?
* What is the true size of the click fraud problem?
* ……..

Here is the response of John Slade (Yahoo! Search Marketings Senior Director of Product Management),

With that belief in mind, Yahoo! is working hard to put our money where our mouth is. We proactively identify suspicious clicks and remove them from our billing system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - as a result, we’ve given away billions of clicks for free. We’ve invested significant technological, financial and human resources in clickthrough protection since we started this industry in 1998 and are redoubling our efforts by dedicating even more resources to this issue. You’ll be hearing more specifics from us soon, but I can tell you that we have in fact committed to building a Traffic Quality Resource Center, are continually expanding our clickthrough protection team and will be announcing new leaders within our organization who will focus entirely on enhancing and overseeing our traffic quality initiatives.

So I think, search engines will be substantially increasing the size of their click fraud protection teams. A combination of human and automatic checking can only be effective in tackling this problem.

Google has recently clarified that images or photos cannot be used near adsense ad units to lure Web site visitors to click them. For example, following type of usage is a strict no-no after this clarification (incidently this is used in a lot of blogs).

From the adsense blog,

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

After this announcement I can see a lot of sites/blogs frantically changing their ad unit placement. I wonder what effect the change will have on their ad click rates!

Remember Alex Tew who created milliondollarhomepage and made a million dollars by selling pixels on his Web page? It was a cool idea and soon thousands of sites tried to make money in a similar way. Few even succeeded in getting some money!

After all the interviews and TV shows, Alex is now back with a new venture called pixelotto. This time he is offering the Web site visitors a million dollars! Here is how it works - Advertisers can place ads for 2$ per pixel and there are a million pixels available. Now the visitors must click on the ads if they want to get the million dollars prize!

Man, that is one clever idea! It is sure to generate a lot of Web traffic on to the advertised pages. Also Alex is going to get the other million dollars generated

Pixelotto has already generated over $130K in ad revenue. The site was down today (13th Dec) for sometime. It appears that the site is unable to handle the traffic.

From today Google adsense is supporting 4 new languages - Croatian, Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. This brings the total number of languages supported to 22. In addition Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, and Hebrew are supported for search alone.

I have been waiting for Google to enable my mother tongue (Malayalam). I don’t think it will happen anytime soon. Meanwhile there are a lot of Malayalam sites which are hosting ads in their site violating adsense terms of service. I think Google is ignoring most of these violations as I am seeing these sites running for years!

If you have Google search on your site, you can now customize its behavior! You can specify a list of sites to search and a list of keywords that is of high priority to your sites. This means that search users in your site will see what you want them to see! This also should help in getting more targeted ads and more adsense revenue.

From the Google adsense blog,

1. Visit http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ and select the websites you’d like to include in your search index.

2. Then choose to restrict search results to include only those pages and sites, or you can give those pages and sites higher priority and ranking within the larger Google index when people search on your search engine.

3. From the CSE site, you can generate the code to place on your site and make the search engine, through an IFRAME, look and feel like your own. If you choose, you can easily link to your current AdSense account so you have a centralized place to manage your Google AdSense relationships.

4. Last but certainly not least, you can invite members of your community to contribute to your search engine index, in real time. Simply enter email addresses of people you’d like to contribute and an invitation along with Google Marker will be sent to your invitees.

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