by John Darer CLU ChFC MSSC RSP CLTC
Today's New York Post online contains a timely report by Holly Ware (Sanders) entitled "Google Comes Clean on Click Fraud".
A Flea Market Like Experience
Click fraud is the cancer of pay per click advertising, a huge money maker for Google, Yahoo and others. Pay per click ads are a hindrance to the consumer Internet experience. One often has to to scroll 1/3 the way down a search engine web page to get to more substantive information in the organic search engine results.
It has been reported that advertisers who use Google's Adsense , and similar pay per click offered by Yahoo and others, lose thousands of dollars monthly due to click fraud, the action of bogus clicking on an advertisement by someone (or group of people) for profit, or by another advertiser (or agent of another advertiser) with intent to run up the vendor's account. Sometimes spam bloggers ("sploggers") set up Google Adsense (or similar) advertising "blocks" on their splog sites and set up "splog mazes" designed to capitalize on consumer confusion, make money for sploggers and ultimately advertisers get hosed. I have been a click fraud victim. One night In June 2005 we had over 1000 clicks in an hour in the middle of the night followed by no calls or emails! Fortunately we were able to get a credit from Yahoo (then Overture). By installing an IP address tracing program you can often discover who is doing it. Unfortunately when a lot of clicks are coming from Asia, or other parts of the world where a market for your product or service does not exist, the cost/benefit analysis of prosecution isn't in your favor and that's what many of these fraudsters are capitalizing on.
When it comes to the key words such as "structured settlement" "structured settlements" these ads are absolutely dominated by vendors who are absolutely not in the structured settlement industry who pay the pay per click equivalent of Fifth Ave in New York, Rodeo Drive in Beverly HIlls or The Miracle Mile in Chicago.
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