Paperclip Marketing

Originally Posted January 5th, 2006

An article in the latest issue of Wired Magazine (“How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet”) has raised a few feathers in the search engine advertising professional community. In fact, discussion of the article has hit front page news on Webmaster World where the focus has primarily been on the possibility of PPC systems eventually migrating to a CPA (cost per acquisition) model. It seems much of the world sees this concept more than any other as possibly holding the key to solving the problem of click fraud.

First, my thoughts on click fraud itself. I have managed many, many PPC campaigns for businesses in every industry imaginable. Some of these businesses have been in markets that are quite competitive, some of them have even been cutthroat industries such as personal injury law. I have seen click fraud, and have worked with Yahoo on multiple occassions in their investigations of claims on behalf of my clients. Like just about everyone else, I have also seen Google regularly and repetitively credit back costs for large numbers of clicks seemingly deemed uncredible (although, as the article amply describes — Google does shroud these refunds in an air of mystery). Even so, I have an extremely hard time believing that the speculative figures so often stated as fact surrounding the prevalance of click fraud are true. Even with proxied bots clicking ads, impression spamming competitors, and splogging (yes, splogging) — my experience with PPC simply can not support claims that fraud makes up such a large percentage of total click volume.

But, reporting on click fraud makes good news. It plays upon people’s fear of Internet scams that the traditional advertising, marketing and even retail communities are so happy to get behind. “Stick with what you know — print advertising, tv, radio… they are safe“, they say.

Don’t believe the hype. PPC advertising works. That’s why in the entire story, written entirely on the subject of the danger of click fraud, the sentence that really caught my eye was: “Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau.”

Seeing that in print gave me goosebumps — surely PPC is going to continue to evolve as it matures, certainly combatting click fraud is one element of this that will have to be addressed along the way. But, make no mistake about it — PPC is here to stay.