Think click fraud is a thing of the past? Nope! Bigreds.com is suing Yahoo for 1 million dollars alleging that they were charged for fraudulent clicks as part of their pay-per-click online advertising campaign that Yahoo could have and should have prevented.

While click fraud is certainly a pay-per-click industry issue, and not specific to Yahoo, it will be interesting to see how this lawsuit progresses.

You can read more about Yahoo being sued for click fraud in this Information Week Article entitled “Yahoo Hit With $1 Million Click Fraud Lawsuit“.

StumbleUpon   del.icio.us    Digg It   Facebook   Technorati   

I’m a client of Aldebaran Web Design and Jill kindly invited me to post in her blog about my YellowPages.com pay-per-click advertising experience. This story is for you, the small business owner with a website, who might be contemplating hiring a company to do pay-per-click advertising for you. Please don’t do it! Please repeat after me: “I promise I will use Google AdWords exclusively, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design for guidance if needed.�

Read the rest of this entry »

Bounce Rate has become my very favorite metric to watch when looking at website traffic statistics. This article explains what bounce rate is, how it’s measured, what bounce rate statistics look like, and what the bounce rate is trying to tell you to do.
Read the rest of this entry »

I got a phone call today from a Google AdWords representative. Two weeks ago, I had submitted an email request for help, because a particular keyword had a “poor” quality score and I couldn’t figure out why. The online chat representative had recommended I break the ad groups into smaller pieces, which I did, but the keyword was still “poor” after a few days so I emailed in for more assistance.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dynamic Ad Title Generation - Just Say No! If you are thinking of signing up with a PPC company, or are already running a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign, I strongly suggest that you make sure they aren’t running ads with dynamically generated titles. I’ll show you some examples of what these look like, and whey they can lead to poor quality clicks, and in some cases false advertising.
Read the rest of this entry »

I learned a new word the other day: “arbitrage”. I was having an online chat with a representative from Google AdWords to learn more about PPC quality. What I learned gave me a new addition to my click fraud vocabulary, and a new warning to give to clients who may be thinking about launching a pay-per-click advertising campaign: Beware of traffic that comes from arbitrage or “made for adsense” websites and directories.
Read the rest of this entry »

For those of us who work with Pay-Per-Click campaigns, who obsessively check our Google AdWords results several times per day, here’s a little humor.

Enjoy!

StumbleUpon   del.icio.us    Digg It   Facebook   Technorati   

New websites often don’t rank well in Google’s organic search for several months and therefore to get website traffic, new website owners sometimes engage a pay-per-click campaign using well-known Google AdWords. Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned from helping my own clients with their Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns. I also recommend visiting the impressive Google AdWords online Learning Center - It’s got an incredible amount of information that teaches you how to totally control your AdWords campaign.

Read the rest of this entry »

Beware of Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Citysearch!

After spending many months focusing on getting good organic search engine rankings for my own website, I decided to get some experience with pay-per-click advertising for two reasons. First I wanted to see if it would increase my own site’s traffic. Secondly, I wanted to be able to recommend a pay-per-click strategy for my clients. I decided to start with well known Citysearch. (Update: I now am confident in recommending Google AdWords for those clients who need pay-per-click traffic - but you must actively manage the ad campaign. If you want help managing a Google AdWords campaign, click here.)

Read the rest of this entry »