Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I personally feel like fraudulent click traffic is a huge problem, more so with certain smaller PPC search engines than others, but it definitely exists and costs advertisers a lot of money. There's a recent article by Tom Zeller of the New York Times taking about the problem.

I think it's one of those things most people in the industry know about, but since it's so difficult to track, people just kind of ignore it. I like the fact that it's finally getting some attention in the mainstream press. Outside the search marketing/Net marketing crowd, I'm sure it's a relatively unknown phenomenon. Some search engines are a lot better about filtering out junk/fraudulent traffic than others. The main problem causing all the headaches for marketers is the whole PPC business model--namely the ppc affiliate programs. PPC affiliates are given a very strong incentive to cheat the system and create bogus traffic through their links.

Andrew Goodman thinks the level of click fraud is being blown way out of proportion. I think he must have read a different article than the one I read. That article doesn't blow anything out of proportion, it simply ackowledges that this is a problem. Sarcastic little remarks about ad nazis don't make it any less of a real problem--a problem that search engines don't seem to care about because not enough advertisers are making a fuss, mostly because they lack the ability to properly track fraudulent traffic.

For now, my best solution for beating fraudulent traffic is to track results from each search engine (and each keyword if possible), so I can know what the ROI is on my advertising dollars. Then I kill any ad spends that aren't performing at an acceptable level. I've run PPC campaigns that yield a 0% conversion rate, and whether that's fraudulent traffic or just bad advertising, it makes sense to cut off the bleeding. Hopefully market forces will cause the search engines to take more interest in cutting down on fraudulent traffic, but as long as they keep getting advertisers willing to blindly pay for whatever traffic they can send, they'll keep on sending "whatever traffic".