Is Click Fraud Really a Problem?Written by Tommy Maric
Click fraud is currently a major topic in online advertising. Many argue that it presents a threat to stability and viability of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, key revenue generator for both Google and Overture. In actuality, click fraud is not a significant issue at all.Click fraud occurs when ads are clicked for reasons other than a genuine interest in learning more about product or service advertised. Click fraud occurs in two forms. In one instance, fraud arises from competitors trying to sabotage each other. One competitor clicks on ads of another just to drain budget of that company. The other instance occurs when webmasters (or people associated with webmaster) repeatedly click Google AdSense ads (which are syndications of others’ ads) on their own web pages in order to generate more revenue. While both Overture and Google have developed sophisticated technologies to detect click fraud, their systems are, and may never be, foolproof. The real question is how much does click fraud actually damage PPC industry? Gross fraud, i.e., when one person or technology consistently and repeatedly clicks on an ad, aside, which Overture and Google can easily detect, we believe that click fraud has no real impact on industry. The following explains why. Efficient market theory says that it is impossible to “beat a market” because prices already incorporate and reflect all relevant information. As PPC industry has matured, efficiency has begun to take root. That is, price of each keyword has been driven up to point where it reflects highest price an advertiser is willing to pay for a click. For instance, a book retailer may pay $1.00 per click based on internal metrics. These metrics dictate, for example, that on average 30% of clickers purchase a book and average profit per sale is $4.00. So, for every 100 clicks ($100 cost), they make 30 sales ($120 revenue) and generate a $20.00 (20%) profit. Note that years ago, same retailer may have been able to pay only $0.50 per click, but as market matured and more retailers began advertising, competitive bidding forced price up to $1.00 where highest return most advertisers can make is 20%.
| | How To Start A Linking CampaignWritten by Torgeir Sunnarvik
Getting links to a new website, without Google page rank, can be difficult and sometimes nearly impossible. Most of websites that have a good page rank in first place, don't link back to sites without page rank. Some of webmasters won't even link back to sites unless they have a page rank of 4 or more. Everybody knows that link popularity is one of most important factors for getting high search engine rankings. So getting links in to your site should be one of your main goals in your everyday work for your site. I struggled hard in beginning. I sent hundreds of link requests every day. If I was lucky, I got one link back. It was simply too much work considering I did not get much in return. Now I know that I should have done things a little different. First of all, I should have started out by sending my link to web directories, instead of using my time asking for links from webmasters that will not link back most of time. Including your link in various web directories is often easiest way of getting good links to your site. Many of directories are free and don't require a reciprocal link. Second, I started writing articles about theme of my site. This seems to be best way of getting links and targeted traffic. In beginning, it can be a little hard to find things to write about. The main thing is to write about theme of your website. For instance, writing about dogs when your site is about cats won't get you visitors that you want. When you write an article that has some relevance to your site, you will get targeted visitors when they click link at bottom of your article. And by using your targeted keywords in link description, you will get higher link popularity.
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