Posts filed under 'PPC'
Many UK advertisers have recently received correspondance from Yahoo regarding the launch of a new ranking model (of which Panama is a step away from the traditional bidding system used by Yahoo), which bases positions of adverts on a number of criteria other than merely cost per click
A rough outline of the new algorithm could be outlined as follow (with positioning based on a eCPM)
(Cost X CTR) * 1000 x (?) = eCPM
Other criteria obviously goes into this equation and this is in its simplest form, however it does provide a basis for the Panama algorithm (according to a recent rep I spoke to)
However back to the e-mail, which goes on to state
“Sponsored Search system will be rolled out in the UK soon, beginning with advertiser migration later this quarter.” There are several UK advertisers who have already been invited to Yahoo meetings to discuss and demonstrate the new features in Panama. The migration in the UK follows the launch of Panama in the U.S. in October 2006.
May 30th, 2007
Been browsing round the results today, and noticed a couple of changes not noticed before.
1) It was only a matter of time before they included it, following the development of Google Checkout, however right next to the-direct-group.co.uk result was a banner for Google Checkout.
However just because they can I have to say, they shouldn’t. One of the best things about Google is the fact that it has always been impartial without lending weighting one way or another (apart from factors such as Bid Price/Quality Score etc), however this really is a break from the norm, and one that I wholeheartedly disagree with (no doubt this will lead to a rath of people redeveloping their e-commerce platforms to incorporate Google Checkout)
2) Google joins the Web2.0 Personalised Search club. Whilst doing a site:example.com on google noticed the ability to ‘note this’ on the results.
No doubt more to come from Google in the coming months
April 24th, 2007
According to a recent report by E-Consultancy and search marketing firm, Neutralize (*\*), UK companies are seeing the benefits of paid search engine optimisation or SEO.
The report went on to state, that nearly two thirds of those surveyed had seen increases in excess of 300%, with fourty percent of those experiencing increases of over 500%. Unsuprisingly this has had a knock on effect in terms of increased confidence in UK SEO, and UK search engine marketing in general.
Other key findings in the report were
- 87% of search engine marketers said their organisations paid to advertise on Google, compared to 45% for Yahoo, 33% for MSN, 11% for MIVA and 6% for Ask.
- More than half of respondents (56%) said that their companies spend in excess of £10000 on paid search annually. A quarter of respondents (25%) reported spending more than £100000 annually.
- 62% plan to greatly increase investment in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for natural/organic listings.
- On average, respondants spent circa 32% of their marketing budget on online marketing.
April 16th, 2007
Google has released Manager Defined Spend or MDS, a pay per click campaign management tool that allows agencies to amend and update Google PPC campaigns instantaneously.
The main purpose behind MDS is to cut negotiation times and provide agencies with tigher budgetary control.
MDS is currently being released to agencies worldwide., and is designed to counter situations where cammpaigns need to be changed or launched immediately, but are restricted by the time it takes for checks to be carried out.
Source: New Media Age (22nd March 2007)
March 23rd, 2007
I have read a lot recently regarding personalisation in particular from Google, and much has been debated within the SEO community itself on various forums such as SEW, Threadwatch and Cre8asite as to the ongoing effects of introducing personalisation.
In general, whilst the delivery mechanism of such a drastic change in focus will remain the overiding factor in determining whether such a change works to Google’s benefit (and delivers us consumers the results we expect), the effects of such change will provide us Search Engine Marketeers with new challenges.
However in my opinion such a change can only be good for the industry. Gone are going to be the days where results were based on the number of “number 1 terms” and campaigns will be judged by what they physically deliver to a client in terms of ROI, bringing it inline with other forms of advertising both off and online.
This should in turn make us search engine marketeers/engineers start thinking like more traditional marketeers, and rely on a variety of marketing techniques in order to ensure ROI on the websites. In my opinion not a bad thing, and I doubt that other forms of advertising will ignore those that can deliver such results. That and the use of PPC will probably increase in popularity as advertisers endeavour to ensure constant visibility in key areas.
March 6th, 2007
Google has introduced new functionality allowing Google Adwords pay-per-click administrators/managers more control including the ability to pause keywords, sites and ad creatives. As of the 15th of February 2007, all AdWords advertisers can pause and resume keywords (for keyword-targeted campaigns), sites (for site-targeted campaigns), and ad creatives.To read the post in full please visit the Google Adwords blog
February 20th, 2007
Click fraud is the latest ‘hot topic’ circulating the online marketing arena, but what is it? And how does it affect you as a merchant running a pay-per-click campaign?
Spending on Internet advertising is growing faster than any other sector of the advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to $29 billion by 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to the researcher eMarketer Inc. With around 50% of this spending being spent on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Here E-Gain New Media Ltd. offer you a complete guide as to what this phenomenon is, who is likely to commit such an act, how to identify & prevent click fraud and how to best report instances of suspected click fraud on your PPC campaign.
What is Click Fraud?
According to Wikipedia “Click fraud is a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link”
Click Fraud is estimated to range from 5% - 15% of pay-per-click traffic (some estimates are as high as 20% - 35%) although Google estimates click fraud at only 2% due to the rigorous detection methods they claim are in place.
In a recent study by Click Forensics, click fraud reached a new high of 14.2% in the last quarter of 2006 with the average rate of click fraud on ‘content networks’ as high as 19.2% for the same quarter.
So who is likely to commit Click Fraud?
The click fraud villain is most likely to fall into one of three categories:
- Online vandals with nothing better to do than cause a nuisance
- A competitor clicking on your search network PPC ads, with the sole intention of increasing your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This could be interpreted as click fraud, although currently the search engines do not consider this kind of activity as click fraud
- Search Engine advertising affiliates who generate self-income from fraudulent clicks on ‘content network’ adverts displayed on their own websites. This practice, at it’s extreme, involves the use of unscrupulous ‘paid to read’ or PTR sites, which are basically click-fraud rings, some with hundreds or thousands of participants, paid to click on your ads with no regard for your return on investment (ROI) as the advertiser
What are the Search Engines doing about it?
Both Google and Yahoo claim that they filter out most fraudulent clicks. The costs involved for these clicks are either not charged or are reimbursed to advertisers who have been wrongly billed.
To combat click fraud Google applies four layers of fraud detection:
- Automatic detection - this filters clicks from both the search and content networks in real-time with the goal of removing them before their existence is ever shown to the advertiser
- The “Flagging system” - an automatic process to remove invalid AdSense clicks
- The “Manual review” - this process has more than two-dozen Google employees tasked with manually reviewing and removing any suspicious AdSense clicks
- If the first three layers of protection fail then the fourth and final layer of click fraud detection falls to the advertiser and 3rd party click fraud detection companies. Google refers to this layer as “requested investigations”
Googles main aim is that the first three layers of filtering will identify all invalid and fraudulent clicks. These layers currently filter more than 98% of invalid clicks.
And should you be in any doubt, both Google and Yahoo have, in the past, released the following statements:
“We think click fraud is a serious but manageable issue” says John Slade, Yahoo’s senior director for global product management. “Google strives to detect every invalid click that passes through its system” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, the Google manager for trust and safety. “It’s absolutely in our best interest for advertisers to have confidence in this industry.”
As a positive for the future, Google is currently testing a cost-per-action (CPA) platform, which should effectively deal with click fraud. With CPA ads you don’t pay by the click but instead pay when the customer reaches a certain goal: buys a product, fills an enquiry, etc.
How to identify click fraud on your pay-per-click campaign
Before you can even contemplate identifying click fraud you must have effective tracking tools implemented on your website and, if possible, access to your server logs. With tracking tools in place, the most obvious way of spotting click fraud is to simply observe any spikes in traffic where there is no particular shift in your conversions.
Once identified, these spikes can then be analysed by looking for repeated clicks from sources that look similar. This similarity could be an IP address or an IP range; it could be a combination of IP range; browser version; operating system. Basically look for data in groups that looks fraudulent.
If all this is just ‘a bit too heavy’ for you then there are a number of companies out there that can help.
- AdWatcher - claims to able to spot click fraud so that you can report it. Covers other aspects of PPC marketing, by helping you track your ROI, email success, etc.
- Click Auditor - offers the ability to check whether your competitors IP is the one performing any abusive clicking, and says it will stealthily gather your competitors IP addresses for this purpose.
- ClickSentinel - focuses on helping you get refunds on fraudulent clicks, as requesting a refund from your PPC provider can often be very difficult for the un-initiated.
- Click Tracks - reportedly has automatic click fraud reporting along with other click tracking (analytics) tools.
Reporting suspected Click Fraud
When reporting suspected click fraud, you must include as much captured data as possible to increase your likelihood of obtaining a refund or credit.
The following guidelines are recommended:
- Clearly state, at the very beginning of your claim, that you are reporting suspected click fraud
- Provide a full explanation to support your claim
- Include your account details (do not include your password or payment information)
- State the exact keyword, ad and campaign where you suspect click fraud has occurred
- State the exact time, date and IP address of each instance of suspected click fraud. This data can be gleaned from your server logs or 3rd party tracking tool
- Finally, state whether you are requesting a refund, credit or investigation
If you were using any software tools, such as those highlighted earlier, to help you track and report click fraud then include any reports generated by these in your claim.
Lowering the risk of Click Fraud happening to you!
Always bear in mind that your PPC objective is to get conversions and not just clicks.
The more you have researched the demographics of your intended client base the better your chance of avoiding click fraud. Are your clients from a specific country or location? When are they likely to search for your product or service? What are the key search-terms they are using?
With demographic data in-hand you can target your ad campaigns more effectively and lower your risk of click fraud.
February 14th, 2007
Matt Cutts has a very good post on his blog about PPC tracking and the discrepancies that can arise as a result of third party web log analysis. In particular with reference to a document by Shuman Ghosemajumder (links as follows):
In the article Shuman says:
“Here`s the problem: web logs, whether generated by an advertisers, or by third-party code on an advertiser`s site, cannot directly track ad clicks. Instead, they track visits to a special landing page URL on the advertiser`s site (e.g. http://example.com/?adwords ) as a proxy for how many ad clicks occurred. The assumption they`re relying upon is that each visit to that URL corresponds to a unique click, and vice versa. But in practice this is not the case. Once a user visits that page, they often browse through the site, navigating through sub pages, and then return to the original landing page by hitting the back button. When the landing page is reloaded in the browser, it appears in the web log as though additional ad clicks are occurring. Google can count ad clicks reliably as a click on a Google ad will cause the web browser to contact Google and then we redirect it to the advertiser`s landing page. A reload of the advertiser`s landing does not contact Google again. In addition, the referrer URL which is passed by the browser when users hit the back button is actually the original referrer URL (which says the page came from an ad click) which gets cached, so there is no analysis which can be done based on logs alone which can resolve this. This is where the fictitious clicks come from.
So is there a solution to this? Yes. Third-party analytics (not click fraud) firms have been aware of the page reload issue for many years, and generally use redirects (rather than web log based tracking) to avoid it. If one is tied to using web site logs (or landing page code generating logs) however, the only solution is to use the AdWords auto-tagging feature. Auto-tagging has been available since 2005, and is a feature which appends a unique ID to the landing page URL for every click, so that the cases of (a) multiple clicks and (b) multiple reloads of the landing page can be easily distinguished.”
However having hyper-analysed the performance of one of our major clients, a debt management company here in the UK, I have to question some of the points made. At some points today, the click:impressions ratio was 2:1 in the clicks favour, all chargeable by Google. Surely this is something that could be very easily sorted by a quick cookie reference prior to forwarding to the site, instead of recharging the advertiser.
This is something that Google really should be looking at, whilst no other online medium flexibility that PPC on the whole does, no other channel online is as easily manipulated as PPC, not just Google (we have had even worse problems with the current Yahoo platform on certain terms.
To see Matt Cutts full blog post, click here
February 5th, 2007
During the recent Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, California (SES San Jose), the new ad platform from Yahoo! Search Marketing was previewed. During the presentation Yahoo! Search Marketing explained some of the features of the new system
- New ad platform will be more like Google Adwords in terms of functionality, moving away from the “highest bid” wins type scenario that currently exists.
- Moving to a more “ad-group” type model -> ie targets, creative, call to action
- Geo-Targetting - the ability to target certain demographics including specific regions and languages
- Keyword suggestion tool based on data collated from spidering the targeted landing page
- Adverts will allow for A/B split testing
- Ability to budget at both campaign and group level
- Keyword tool displaying the estimated level of traffic
A lot of the above sounds like Yahoo are moving in a similar direction to Google, however there does seem to be some exiciting new stuff from a Yahoo perspective.
Expect this out towards the end of 2006.
August 24th, 2006
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