3 Steps To Cut Click Fraud Losses On Your PPC Campaign

Just noticed this interesting site about click fraud. Their latest report says that average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. And, In Q4 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3 percent) Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).

Interestingly, their click-fraud high threat heat map shows the entire world in medium to high threat area(!). The only exceptions are countries/regions in Australia and parts of Africa. Probably no one knows about internet in those areas:)

So, how do they tackle the click-fraud problem?
Click Forensics claims to have some 4000 members who have come together to create a Click Fraud Network(sounds like they would be committing click frauds :) shouldn't this be prefixed with Anti-?) Click Forensics would do the back-end work for these advertisers for a cost.

This is a high potential market, which is clear from the fact that Click Forensics has closed $10 million Series B funding round this week. That's big money when you think of the hapless PPC advertisers who are sweating to save their money draining out through click frauds.

The fact remains that, to cut losses through click-frauds you don't need to join anywhere. I can suggest PPC advertisers 2 simple steps which can help them cut losses immediately -

Step 1: Stop PPC advertising on the MFA (Made for AdSense) sites immediately - unless your site gets good/any value out of this. If you have been running PPC ads for some time, you can easily find out that content network shows you the biggest click-throughs but fails miserably at conversions. Why? these clicks are mostly coming through MFA sites which do not add any value to your business. (See more on this below)

Step 2: Start using Geo-targeting - Whatever your business may be, chances are, majority of your target customer would be from a particular geographical region. Then, why not geo-target your PPC ads? Just select the geographical regions you want the ad to be shown in and let Google take it over from there.

Step 3: What if my ads are still shown and clicked outside the geo-target?
You can always claim those back from Google as it would be counted as an 'invalid click'. Google is very pro-active in refunding for genuine cases.

What if my target market itself is in high-threat click fraud zone?
Well, God save you :) In this case you must stop content network altogether or spend some time blocking your ads from MFA sites. Actually not all sites are bad, but it takes time to weed out the bad ones. You'd save quite a lot.

What are the signs of a high-threat click-fraud MFA site?
Look for these signs before pressing 'escape':
- 3 ad units on every/most pages
- use of big rectangle ad unit on every/most pages
- 2 or more ad units above the fold
- pages show more ad units than content

Google or Yahoo would not tell this because they don't want to upset(see related story) their Publisher Networks, which bring in the moolah for them. Any more ideas on this? Let me know ~

How Do Top Social Networks Rank Across Continents?

I have often wondered if it's possible to actually develop more business contacts through social networks with better precision and speed than I currently do. The criteria here is - more contacts, better targeting, and faster results.

I came across this cool graphic chart on this french site which uses Datamonitor ranks for the top social networking sites across different continents. What's interesting here is NOT the rank itself , but the very important thing we normally miss while signing up with every second social network - And, that's "where do I want to develop my network?"

Even though Facebook is among the top social network, if I want to develop my business contacts/ social network in Asia - it's not the best option! In fact, Facebook is NOT even in the top 5 social networks in Asia by usage. The chart shows me that Friendster or Orkut would offer much more traffic and users in Asia. Similarly, if I'm looking at Europe or North America, my first stop must be Bebo and Myspace. That was cool to know!

See how Datamonitor ranked the social networking sites across continents:

North America:

1. Myspace
2. Facebook
3. Bebo
4. GaiaOnline
5. Nexopia
   

Latin America:

1. Orkut
2. Hi5
3. MetroFlog
4. Myspace
5. LiveSpaces
   

Asia Pacific:

1. Friendster
2. Cyworld
3. Orkut
4. Mixi
5. Myspace
   

Europe:

1. Bebo
2. Myspace
3. Skyblog
4. Facebook
5. Netlog
   

Africa:

1. Facebook
2. Hi5
3. Netlog
4. Yonja
5. Skyblog
   

Now this is the kind of information which one can use and get targeted growth in contacts at much faster rate than blindly going with the top social network. Go forth and multiply your contacts where you really want to!

The ONLY Search Market Where Google Is No.2

There is one search market where Google had to be content being No.2 - and that's in China.

According to the China Internet Marketing Network Information Center, Google handled less than 25 per cent of all Chinese web searches - and its share was shrinking rapidly. Baidu, a chinese search engine is the runaway leader with a 62 per cent of the market.

Surprisingly, a research by Enquiro, a search engine marketing firm, reports that Baidu’s dominance isn’t down to technology. It's down to brand. In a blind taste test carried out by the firm this month, the Chinese version of Google significantly outperformed Baidu.

"With Google, the average search took around 30 seconds," says Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro president and CEO. "With Baidu, it was up around a minute." But, the Chinese users still prefer Baidu. Baidu has actually become a brand for search engine in China.

If you look at the other markets where Google leads in search, this same story plays out just the opposite. In almost every other market, Google has become a brand for search (as in "I'll google it") and whether or not it's search results are best(I personally love them!), Google gets more users than every other search engine.

So, what is happening to Google in China is very interesting. We'll wait for how Google tackles this important market with an exploding internet population.