Long ago, my client had once opened a SuperPages.com account and started a pay-per-click campaign. She put the pay-per-click campaign in a “paused” state several years ago and forgot about it.

But then, she received an email recently that said SuperPages.com was actually billing her $20 per month since October 2008. She was surprised to see these charges were indeed showing up on her business credit card. SuperPages.com told her that they changed their policy in October 2008, to begin charging a monthly fee on paused pay-per-click campaigns, even though customers were not actually getting any clicks – because the campaign was paused, inactive, dead, you get the idea. The client’s credit card was getting charged $20 each month, month after month, no clicks.

My client called SuperPages.com provided by an online chat session (1-866-478-2611) and was successful in getting all of the credit card charges refunded (as of the writing of this article, this hasn’t been completed yet, but SuperPages.com has promised).

SuperPages.com’s parent company, Idearc Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2009. It seems that it would be prudent for folks who might find themselves in this situation to a) carefully review their credit card statements to look for charges and b) if they indeed have been accruing monthly fees for a paused pay-per-click account, contact SuperPages.com to ask for a refund. Time might be running out.

The account executive offered me an opportunity to set up a “mutually beneficial” business relationship, whereby I’d refer my clients to Citysearch and in exchange, the Citysearch account executive would refer new website clients to me. These kinds of offers are not new to me, as I’ve also gotten them from Yellowpages.com sales people in the past.

I can’t honestly refer my clients to pay-per-click companies like Citysearch, Yellowpages.com or Dex,  because of the personal experiences I’ve had and that my clients have had with them. And so after some thought, I responded to the Citysearch account executive with a pleasant, “no thanks.” I wrote that while I’d be happy to accept referral traffic from her, it would have to be with “no formal strings attached,” implying that I’d in no way be able to reciprocate.

A month went by, and I didn’t receive a response from the Citysearch account executive and I forgot about it. But then today, a month after sending me the initial solicitation and after apparently reading my blog article about Citysearch click fraud, the account executive sent me an angry email accusing me of “bashing” her company and was “shocked” that I responded to her email at all. Needless to say, it wasn’t a pleasant email for me to receive.

Rather than attack me, here’s how a representative of Citysearch who has found my blog article could have responded:

They could have read over the article carefully and seen that this issue isn’t just about me, but there are many folks out there with legitimate complaints about Citysearch and click fraud. They could have actually attempted to understand the issues and made an attempt to address them. Or they could say, yes, we’ve had issues in the past, but we’ve fixed them and to prove it, we’ll give you a free account for a month.

Wait, did I just say a free account?! Actually asking a pay-per-click company to prove that their claims will be true before signing a long term contract? Where would I get a crazy idea like this? Because I’m a certified Google AdWords consultant, and they give us these $100 coupons that we can give away to new clients so they can actually try out the service at no cost and no risk. If you don’t feel like the $100 was well spent, no problem. Some pay-per-click companies, like Google, let you do a test drive before you buy.

But not Citysearch (or Yellowpages.com or Dex or others). Their sales folks just tell us small  business owners to trust them, that they’ve got lots of satisfied customers.

I once sat across a table from a Dex Online salesperson (at the request of a client) who, after I’d showed him clear evidence of poor quality clicks from Dex to their website, told me that yes, they had a problem but now it’s been fixed. The Dex sales person wanted my client to renew their annual contract. So I asked him to give them a free trial period to prove to my clients that this issue of poor click quality was indeed fixed. He said he couldn’t do that.

So I asked the Dex online salesperson how were we supposed to trust him? He had just admitted, after being showed hard website traffic data, that the clicks he had charged my client for  during the past year, were worthless. And he was not only refusing to give them a refund, but wanted them to renew their contract based on his statement (with no supporting documentation) that the issue was now magically fixed? Without being willing to give my clients even a single month of free traffic as proof? Let’s review this. The sales person denied an issue. Then confronted with data, the sales person admits an issue existed. The sales person claims it’s fixed, but sorry, won’t give you either a refund for their past poor quality service or a free trial period for their new and improved services. Trust them, they say.

Trust sales folks? Seriously – give us a free trial period and let us small business website owners decide for ourselves. I’m sure there are some folks out there who like Citysearch and these other pay-per-click companies, but until a particular business owner in a particular market with a particular budget can see whether this type of advertising is cost-effective for them, I don’t think that it’s a one-size-fits-all “trust me it will work” online marketing solution.

If the Citysearch person was actually really interested in changing my opinion (and not just getting me to send her business blindly), why not offer  me a free trial? I’d certainly write a blog article praising Citysearch if the new experience proved to be a good one. Remember my last experience was 2 years ago – a lot could have changed at Citysearch. And if the Citysearch account executive was 100% sure I’d love the service, then this would be at no risk to them.  But rather than try to 1) understand my issues and 2) try to fix them or demonstrate they no longer exist, the account executive got angry and hostile with me.

So after two years of no contact with Citysearch – another bad experience. It’s a shame, because this could have been an opportunity for Citysearch to improve my opinion of their services. A missed opportunity indeed.

The client’s daily budget was $7.00 per day. She was hitting this budget before the end of each day, and therefore her ads would stop showing. We decided to run a two week experiment in the first half of November and cut all her bids in half. Then in the second half of November, we raised the bids up to halfway between the current amount and the original amount.  Here’s an example:

Oct 1 – Oct 31  bid was $2.00

Nov 1 – Nov 14 bid was lowered to $1.oo

Nov 14 – Nov 25 bid was increased to $1.50

This should give you the general idea of what we did. Of course each Ad Group had different bid prices, but we followed the same algorithm of cutting in half, then raising halfway.

Here are the results:

A comparison of the total cost for the three time periods. You can clearly see the budget being hit in October, and then it not being used in early November because we had set the bids too low. When we raised the bids up in mid November, we again were able to use up our daily budget.

Next we’ll look at a comparison of the cost per click (CPC). See how the average CPC was lower in early November, higher in later November, and still higher in October.

Now for the final comparison numbers. This chart compares two weeks of the  baseline period Oct 1 – 13,  to the final two week test period, Nov 14 – Nov 25. Notice that the final period had 17.1% more clicks yet the total cost was reduced by 11.9% and the CPC was reduce by nearly 25%! Let’s repeat that, we paid 25% less but got 17% more clicks.

Amazing isn’t it? So if you’re hitting your daily budget, you can try this yourself.

Lower your bid prices by some amount that you think will actually cause you not to use up your daily budget. For this experiment, I picked 50%, but your case may be different. Then, once you’ve lowered the prices too much, raise them back up and do the comparisons for equivalent time periods. If you’re fortunate like we were, you may be able to find a sweet spot, where you actually get more clicks but are paying less for them!

This is a lovely example of how an unscrupulous internet marketing person was using Google AdWords to dupe a naive business owner. The business owner was completely amazed when he saw his business at the top of the sponsored listings column for particular keywords. He was impressed, and very tempted to hire the obviously talented internet marketing company.

But let’s look at this closer, and hopefully avoid some of you from being taken by this same “trick”. I use the word “trick” loosely, because in fact, ANYONE can put up an ad that will temporarily appear at the top of the Google AdWords paid listings. It’s all a matter of what you’re willing to pay for a click. So if you’re trying to impress the heck out of a small business owner, it’s a pretty cheap trick to be willing to pay a very high bid, maybe $10 or $25 for the one or two clicks you’ll get while you’re running this ruse to convince the person you’re a pay-per-click rocket scientist.

Keep in mind we’re talking about “paid listings” or “sponsored listings” – we’re not talking about the “natural” or “organic” free listings on the left – but rather the paid listings on the right. When they say “first page” of Google, they leave this teeny detail out.

Let’s review how ads show up on Google’s paid listings. First you open a Google AdWords account. That costs $5. Then, you start a campaign, and you can put up an ad that links to a website. Doesn’t have to be your website at all, in fact many folks make their living out of managing the ad campaigns for other folks.

So here’s the scheme. You have an AdWords account. Then you go fishing for small business owners and you tell them you can get them onto the “first page of Google” – every small business owner’s dream. They nibble. And then to make them bite, you post an ad on behalf of their business, for some low priced keywords and you bid really high so that they show up high on Google. The small business owner is amazed and swallows the bait and signs up for a monthly contract that costs them $XXX per month – without being guaranteed any traffic.

Let’s review again. Google AdWords is pay-per-click. This means that the AdWords account holder doesn’t pay Google until someone clicks on the ad, generating a visit to the website listed on the ad. Having an ad show up in the column COSTS NOTHING. It’s the click that generates the cost. Paying for someone to put your ad up is ok. It could lead to traffic. Paying for real live human traffic, is way, way better. That’s the beauty of advertising on the internet, you don’t have to pay for “impressions”, you can pay for clicks!

And let’s also look at the “front page of Google” statement. How many paid advertisements show up on Google’s first page. This varies, but right now, it looks like it’s around eight (8). So you could be #8, at the very bottom. There may be a huge difference in the cost of a bid to be #1 versus #8, and if they show you #1 to get you hooked, but promise “front page”, pay attention. You are getting taken to the pay-per-click cleaners.

Another thing to remember, this placement is for keywords that the company picked, not you. There are many different keywords that a business might think would bring them clients. If you’re a dog trainer, you might want “dog training” or “dog school” or “dog kindergarten” – but which should you pick? This is why you do some experimenting when you set up an ad. But “dog trainer” is going to cost a heck of a lot more than “dog school”, because the competition is greater. So these companies pick out the cheapest words to use in their fishing expedition – so they can charge you more, and pay the minimum for each click. Google has some excellent free keyword analysis tools, check out the keywords they are, and aren’t recommending.

So in summary, if someone contacts you and says they can get you onto the front page of Google, be wary. You’d do much better to open your own Google AdWords account, and take advantage of the online learning center. Or to hire a reputable professional that will explain to you how the process works, instead of trying to trick you. Luckily, the prospective client who sent me this question didn’t sign up, and instead is running his own Google AdWords campaign for much, much, much less than they were going to charge him. And he’s only paying for clicks.

Anyone can put a Google AdWords Qualified Individual or Company logo on their website. So how is a small business owner to know that the person or company who claims to be qualified is really actually certified by Google?

There are several ways to check this out, and I strongly suggest that before you hire anyone that claims to be a “Qualified Individual” or “Qualified Company” that you verify this claim for yourself before you do business with this person or company. Read Google’s advice on how to verify this status.

1. Check the Professional Status Page. Try clicking on the logo or looking for a link that will take you to the “Professional Status page”. To see what one looks like, just click on the logo above to see mine. The professional status page should have the business or individual name and should start with “https://adwords.google.com/select/ProfessionalStatus?”, meaning it should be part of Google’s domain. If you don’t see this link, request it. If the company or individual won’t send it to you, take your business elsewhere.

2. Contact Google. You can also contact Google directly by filling out their online Adwords Support Form.

3. Look them up on WhoIsAGAP’s website. This is not an official Google website, and it seems to be sporadically updated since I’m not on the list and I was qualified in January of 2008 – but it doesn’t hurt to check.

In sum, your only solid  proof is either looking at their Google Professional Status page or having someone from Google tell you they’re qualified (and have them send you the Professional Status page). Don’t hire someone who isn’t officially qualified. If you want to know what the requirements for qualification are, you can read the Google AdWords Qualified Individual Requirements and the Google AdWords Qualified Company Requirements.

I’ve written two articles on click fraud related to pay-per-click services of Citysearch and Yellowpages.com. Both articles have received many comments from small business owners who had similar bad experiences. I’ve also received several phone calls from blog readers who wanted some advice from me regarding what to do after they’ve found themselves locked into a contract with a company like Citysearch, Yellowpages.com, Dex Online etc and are very unhappy with the results.

So here’s my advice to small business owners on how to avoid getting caught in the costly web of online pay-per-click advertising.

1. Avoid signing any long term contracts – there are pay-per-click companies (like Google AdWords) that do not require any long term commitment – not even for a single day. I’ve heard from so many folks who are now struggling to get out of monthly or annual contracts with CitySearch, YellowPages.com and Dex – and while some are eventually successful, many others are now facing threats of legal action, collection agencies and other nasty things.

2. Don’t believe what the salespeople verbally tell you – over and over again, I’ve heard from my blog readers that pay-per-click sales people exaggerated and mislead them – and I’ve had this experience personally from representatives of YellowPages.com and Dex. Only trust what you get in writing or read on their company website.

3. Read the fine print. Many folks where surprised to find that when then signed up for a Citysearch or YellowPages.com or Dex directory listing via pay-per-click, their ad showed up on all kinds of other directories – some that were garbage directories or what’s known in the web world as arbitrage, or made-for-adsense directories. My blog readers didn’t read the fine contract print, and understand that they were authorizing wide distribution of their ads onto “affiliate” networks – whose real sole purpose may be to accumulate fraudulent clicks.

4. Make sure you have control over your pay-per-click ad. A reputable pay-per-click advertising company will give you complete control over your ad campaign. You should be able to control your ad text, where and when your ad is displayed, and most importantly, how much you’re paying for each click and your overall budget. You probably wouldn’t put a ad in a newspaper if you had no control over what the ad copy was or what the cost of the ad was. Pay-per-click should be no different. The reason that this control is not given to you, is because you’re hiring pay-per-click middlemen – versus hiring Google AdWords directly.

5. Getting out of a contract. If you have already signed a contract and now find yourself in the unfortunate position of feeling like you’re not getting value for your money, don’t simply give up. Start communicating in writing – avoid phone conversations that can’t be documented. Move up the corporate food chain by escalating your issue if the current level of interaction isn’t giving you satisfaction. Be prepared to continue this battle for months; persistence will eventually pay off. And if all else fails or you’re simply not the kind of person who is comfortable with conflict, hire an attorney who has experience with click fraud – they’re out there.

A small business owner in San Diego, CA decided to take on Citysearch and sued them for click fraud.  I’m including these links here in the event my readers wanted more information about this action:

Google Search Of Citysearch Lawsuit Articles

Citysearch Lawsuit Attorney Firm – Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP

Citysearch Lawsuit Attorney  - Alfredo Torrijos

One of the neat things about this lawsuit, is that the plaintiff Tom Lambotte, actually left a comment on my blog article about Citysearch click fraud back in late December of 2007. It’s a small world!

Here’s a link to the tool so you can try this out for yourself: Google Keyword Selection Tool.

The tool is designed to help people, primarily those who use Google AdWords Online Advertising, select the best keywords for their campaigns. Here’s an example screenshot (click on the thumbnail to see it full size):

It’s truly incredible data to behold. So if you’re wondering how many people search Google.com for specific keywords, give this free tool a try.

One of the cool things to check out, is clicking on the “Choose columns to display”. In the view above, I’ve chosen to show Volume Trends. No wonder I’ve been so busy lately – look at how searches for website design have gone up over the summer months. Very, very cool data. Maybe I’ll use it to plan my next vacation!

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“.

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.”

I started my Seattle based private psychotherapy practice in the fall of 2007, and soon after Jill and I went live with my new website, it got noticed by online advertising companies who emailed me with business offers: “Sign up on our therapist listing and double your clients!” they’d say, or “The smart therapist hires us for internet advertising!” I deleted most of them, but made the major mistake of taking calls from a sales rep at YellowPages.com.

The YellowPages.com sales rep had seen my website—and he proved he had by describing details about it—and said it was great. (Yes, I’m sorry to say I responded to cheap flattery.) He talked at length about the importance of pay-per-click advertising. At the time, I was experimenting with Google AdWords on my own, but I didn’t feel adept at it. I wasn’t sure I was really making effective ads or getting new clients from it. So…I agreed to hire YellowPages.com to do pay-per-click advertising for me, for quite a lot of money per month.

For a month or two, as the YellowPages.com sales rep warned me, nothing happened. They said they needed to “set up” my account. (Note that with Google AdWords, you can start immediately, and you have full control over your own ads, keywords, campaign themes, everything.)

A month or two later, I got an email from my sales rep with a screen shot of one of my ads. It had a typo in it. (!!) And the text didn’t sound like me. “Run into some trouble?” it said, as if my work as a psychotherapist is to help people who just broke their shoelaces. Most of my clients haven’t “run into some trouble.” They’re wrestling with deep stuff, hard issues, painful problems.

When I asked them to fix the typo, I was told that it would take several days to roll out the fix. (Again, with Google AdWords, it gets fixed the moment you yourself go in and fix it.) And they didn’t want me writing ads. “Run into some trouble” it was, and “Run into some trouble” it was going to continue to be. *sigh*

But the best (worst) was yet to come. In January of 2008, Jill began helping me with my Google AdWords campaign. Part of that included careful review of my website statistics. She started noticing some weird traffic on my site. (I followed her recommendation and use Web-stat, so I could see the weird traffic too.) Jill can recognize invalid clicks and fraudulent pay-per-click traffic, and so Jill emailed me and asked me if I hired someone to do pay-per-click advertising for me. I was embarrassed to say yes, I had hired YellowPages.com.

And here’s what we discovered: my YellowPages.com ads were showing up on odd search-engine sites (odd because they weren’t legitimate sites—they were “made for adsense sites“, sites filled exclusively with sponsored ads, and no real content), and the ads had text like this: “Run into some trouble? Puyallup Therapist. Call today to schedule an appointment.” I boldfaced the word ‘Puyallup’ because it was boldfaced in the ad, and because my therapy office is more than an hour away from Puyallup. The link in the Puyallup ad (and the Bellevue ad, and the Federal Way ad, and on several other ads) was a link to my site.

Turns out YellowPages.com uses dynamic ad-title generation techniques. If someone enters the keywords “Puyallup therapist,” my ad will pop up as a sponsored link, with the word ‘Seattle’ changed to ‘Puyallup.’ This is false advertising. Jill and I found that well over 80% of the clicks on these ads were bounces—the person would click on the ad, see that I don’t work anywhere near Puyallup, and bounce away from my site. And I was paying for the clicks!

I started emailing YellowPages.com, and what followed was a series of email exchanges that would be funny if they weren’t so infuriating.

They tried everything: “Those aren’t our ads.” Oh really? So someone else is paying out of their own pocket to post ads for me that say “Run into some trouble?”?

Their next tactic: “Our ads are performing better than you say.” No, they weren’t. I emailed them bounce-rate data and more screen shots of fraudulent ads.

By this time I was three or four levels of supervisors above my YellowPages.com original sales rep. Each time I would email YellowPages.com, it seemed, my email would be forwarded to someone’s supervisor, who would then try to calm me down and convince me that I wasn’t being taken for a pay-per-click fraud ride.

In the end, they canceled my YellowPages.com pay-per-click account. I didn’t get a refund for the money I had already spent, but they did stop the campaign and have not taken any more of my money.

I hope that if you’ve read this far, you are now a true believer: you have now resolved to stick with Google AdWords, and only Google AdWords, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design if you have questions or want to learn more about doing pay-per-click advertising yourself. Take it from me: I went in another direction, and wow, did I ever run into some trouble!!

—Stephen Crippen, StephenCrippen.com

Footnote by Jill:Stephen is now managing his own Google AdWords campaign and in complete control of his online advertising. I offer Google AdWords Campaign Consulting services to my small business website clients to help them avoid situations like these – this is not the first client of mine that has been caught in a poor quality pay-per-click scheme. I got trapped in one myself with CitySearch before I learned about how easy it is to get caught paying for invalid clicks. My goal, is to teach small business owners how to manage their own Google AdWords accounts – knowledge is power

Bounce rate is typically defined as the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting only 1 page on your website. If 100 people visited your home page, and 50 of them left after only viewing your home page, then your bounce rate is 50%.

Why is Bounce Rate Important?

Because bounce rate can tell you something about the quality of the particular webpage or particular traffic source. Let’s look at some example from my own website traffic statistics:

Bounce Rate For Different Pages On My Website.

You can see that my home page has a bounce rate of 42.3% while my Citysearch click fraud article has a bounce rate of 50.7%. (I’ve just changed the look of my home page, so we’ll see if this rate changes for the month of Feb). Blog articles often have higher bounce rates than “regular” website pages. Look at the different bounce rates for your webpages and investigate what the differences are between pages with low bounce rates and pages with high bounce rates.

Bounce Rates For Referral Sources.

You should also look at the bounce rate for the different traffic referral sources, especially if you are paying for this traffic. Notice that for my website, Google US has a bounce rate of 52.9%, while traffic from websites of my clients has a bounce rate of 34.7%. This makes sense, doesn’t it? If you are using pay-per-click advertising, be sure you’re watching the bounce rate of traffic from your ads, because a higher bounce rate means either your ad isn’t attracting the right buyers, or your ad’s landing page isn’t good enough to capture them.

What Should Your Bounce Rate Targets Be?
Obviously, the lower your bounce rate is, the better. Looking at the web traffic tracking statistics of my clients, the lowest bounce rate for a home page is around 22%. Remember, other things can affect your bounce rate – such as whether folks are searching specifically for your business name (ie: “Ahimsa Dog Training”) or generic keywords (“dog training seattle”). If people are looking for your specific business, due to your advertising efforts, your home page bounce rate will be lower.

I found an article that reported different bounce rates for different types of websites. The following is a quote from their blog:

“Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce. (One vendor told us anything above 33% should be a flag)

Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I’ve seen bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.

Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.

Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.

Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.

Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%

Bounce rates on a blog is something I think is misleading. By their very nature a blog is a long list of posts and articles. I think bounce could quite easily be 80-100% on blogs because people tend to be reading one article or post at a time. However that doesn’t mean that people aren’t finding value which is why i think it’s misleading.”

The above guidelines are based in this one company’s experience, so your bounce rate may differ, but I think it’s a fair guideline to use.

When I checked the keyword quality again after a week had passed, it was “OK”, so the first representative had been correct. I completely forgot about my email request.

I was surprised to get the call today, but floored when the Google AdWords representative said “We’ve been trying to email you, but your email keeps bouncing back. We’ve tried three times, and so that’s why we called”. I asked her to check the email address…and was embarrassed to discover that I had misspelled “design” in my own email address…hence the bouncing.

So GoogleAdWords had continued to attempt contact to help me, and after three bounced emails, gave me a phone call. This is how driven they are to make sure their advertisers get the help they need.

Now, compare this experience to one that a client is having now with a different pay-per-click company. My client sends email after email with lists of specific requests. The PPC company has been picking and choosing which to respond to, and which to ignore. The client has been getting more and more frustrated, and will probably resort to legal action soon. All because someone at the PPC company won’t give my client a straight answer.

While it’s true that I am really fond of Google’s search engine because they bring me new customers, and am also a qualified Google AdWords professional – so I’m probably biased in favor of Google, I am continually impressed at how much better they are at both building search engines and at online advertising than their competition. If you’ve read my article on my experience with Citysearch pay-per-click, you know I don’t always have good thing to say about the companies I deal with. After that experience with Citysearch, I kept looking for a PPC company that I was comfortable recommending to my clients. Google AdWords is the only PPC company I recommend to my clients, and after this experience this morning, I remain strong in that conviction.

Dynamic ad title generation works like this: The PPC company sets your ad title to mirror or echo what the user has typed into a search engine. This makes your ad match exactly what they’re looking for. Sounds like a great way to get more clicks to your ad, doesn’t it? Good for the PPC company because they make money on each click, not so good for you.

One of my clients is a therapist in Seattle WA who signed up for a PPC campaign that used dynamic title generation in its ads on Yahoo and other search engines. We were tipped off when we saw traffic coming in for words like “Issaquah Therapy”. So we looked into this, because my client is not in Issaquah, my client is in Seattle, which is at least 30-40 minutes away. We were stunned to see this ad come up in Yahoo when we tried to duplicate the click by typing in “Issaquah Therapy” (I’ve blurred my client’s URL for privacy).

See how the search words “Issaquah Therapy” are showing in the ad title? This is dynamic title generation. Great for getting clicks from folks looking for therapy in Issaquah. The problem is, my client is too far from Issaquah to be hired from such a search, and had no idea the ad would look like this.

Here’s another:

And another:

And just in case you haven’t seen the pattern, here’s another:

See how the ad titles match the search words? Imaging a prospective client’s great happiness at finding a therapist in their city. But, alas, here’s a map of Seattle:

These cities are NOT near Seattle, in fact, some are over an hour’s drive away, and that’s if traffic is really humming, easily 1.5 or 2 hours if it’s rush hour.

Now, you’re saying, ok, so just tell the PPC company to turn off the dynamic title generation. Well, as of the writing of this post, they’re still running, even though the client has repeatedly, in writing, informed the PPC company to stop these ads from running because they’re false advertising. The PPC company simply doesn’t respond.

I write posts like these to hopefully help prevent this situation from happening to another small business owner who is trying to get more legitimate traffic to their website. Before you sign any PPC contracts with anyone, ask about dynamic ad title generation and don’t permit it.

This is one of the many reasons I became a qualified Google AdWords professional, because I wanted to offer my website clients a legitimate way to use PPC to get more traffic. Unfortunately the PPC world seems full of companies that are only too willing to lock clients into PPC contracts and then deliver fraudulent, invalid, or poor quality click traffic. Please browse through my other articles in the Pay-Per-Click category before you sign up with any Pay-Per-Click advertising company.

I was looking at a particular client’s website traffic statistics because I was managing his Google AdWords campaign, when I noticed traffic coming from strange new directories. The client said that he had signed up with a different PPC company (not Google AdWords) and that this might be the source. I investigated these traffic sources and here’s what I found:

A directory with NO CONTENT – 100% ADS!

This is an example of arbitrage or what is known in the online advertising world as “made for adsense” or MFA websites. These websites have no content, their sole purpose is to drive clicks. You can read more about arbitrage in this article MFA Sites: Pay-Per-Click’s dirty little secret from the Click Fraud Network and in this article from Marketing Pilgrim.

Here’s a quote from the article The Click Fraud “State of the Union” at Click Fraud Network:

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch, traffic in the publisher [content] networks (including Google AdSense) is abysmal. Over 70% of the sites that make up these networks are made-for-ad sites or parked domains. Well over 60% of the traffic from these types of sites is traffic advertisers should not be paying for. Instead, advertisers should be actively excluding poor performing sites and avoiding low quality ad networks. “

Since these sites have no valuable content, the bounce rate is incredibly high, because and are considered a very, very poor traffic source. My client’s traffic from this source had a 100% bounce rate – literally every single visitor left immediately – the hallmark of poor quality traffic. (Note, these were not his Google AdWords ads, but PPC ads he had arranged with another PPC company prior to starting his Google AdWords campaign.)

How to Protect Yourself From Paying for Traffic From Made For AdSense Junk Sites

1. Track Your Website Traffic. You won’t know what you’re getting for your pay-per-click dollars otherwise. If have a PPC campaign running and you aren’t tracking your traffic, you could be paying for worthless clicks.

2. Investigate Your Traffic Referral Sources: If you see traffic coming from a source you don’t know, look up that URL and see what it looks like. Made For Adsense sites are easy to spot. Remember, they have no content, just ads.

3. Stop The Flow Of Traffic From These Sources, ASAP! If you are using Google AdWords, you’re in luck, because there are several tools available to help you do this. Here’s what the Google AdWords online help fellow advised (note that the traffic in the above example was NOT from a Google AdWords campaign – he was giving this general advice on how to prevent arbitrage after I sent him the screenshot.):

“I spoke with our Specialist Team and they confirmed that the arbitrage sites and directories that resemble the ones you sent me are not part of our Search Network and will only appear on the Content Network. In order to see on what specific sites your ads are running within the content network, you can run a Placement Performance Report. You’ll also be able to see performance statistics for your ads on each of these sites. Click here to learn how to create a Placement Performance report. You can also use Site Exclusion on the Content Network to exclude your ads from appearing on particular sites as follows:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click ‘Tools’ at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
3. Click ‘Site Exclusion’ under the ‘Optimize your ads’ header.
4. Select your campaign from the drop down box and click ‘Go.’
5. In the field under ‘Add sites to be excluded,’ add the list of websites you want to exclude from showing your ads.
– Add only one website per line. Do not separate websites with commas or other punctuation.
– Enter websites at the domain (www.example.com, example.com), subdomain (topic.example.com), or path (www.example.com/stuff) level only.
– Do not enter individual pages (www.example.com/main.html).
6. When you’re done, click ‘Exclude Sites.’ You’ll see a confirmation page informing you how many sites you’ve chosen to exclude.”

But What If I’m Not Using Google AdWords And Am Using Another PPC Company?

If you are not using Google AdWords for your pay-per-click advertising, then the above controls are not available to you. You will need to contact your pay-per-click advertising representative and tell them you do not want traffic from these “made for adsense” or arbitrage websites and try with all your might to get a refund for the clicks that came from them.

If they won’t or can’t stop the flow of pay-per-click from these “made for adsense (MFA) sites, you might want to consider canceling your account – that is, if they’ll let you.

This is why I only recommend Google AdWords for pay-per-click traffic, because you get complete control over your pay-per-click campaign and can suspend or cancel any ad or your entire account at any time.

So remember, track your traffic, investigate your traffic sources, and if you see MFA (made for adsense) or arbitrage traffic, try to stop it ASAP.

When you set up a new Google AdWords campaign, one of the choices you will have to make is whether to have this particular campaign run on the “search network” or the “content network” or both. These two networks are quite different, and your click through rate (CTR) will also be impacted depending on your selection. (CTR is the number of clicks divided by number of impressions, impressions being the number of times your ad is shown).

Search Network: Google Search and Google Partner Search

The “search network” is made up of Google’s search engines (Google.com) and many other search engines that Google considers partners. Don’t worry about who makes up the Google partners, but rather what’s important is that these are all search engines. This means that the people who will see your ad are all in the process of searching, looking for some solution to their problem, or a product or service to buy.

Here are some screenshots to show you examples of ads that are running on the Google Search and Google Partner Search. The ad is for a Shy Dog class run by Ahimsa Dog Training.

Here’s the ad on Google’s regular search site:

And here’s the same ad running on one of Google’s search partners, Ask.com.

Again, keep in mind that when your ad runs on the search network, people who see your ad are actively searching – therefore the CTR for these ads are generally higher than they are for the content network, which I’ll cover next.

The Content Network

The content network is a vast network of websites that have content, all kinds of content. Google is smart enough to know what content is on each page and will show your ad on a page that has relevant content. So in this example, if a web page has content that’s related to the keywords in ad, in this case shy dogs, Google will show ads that are relevant to shy dogs, such as Ahimsa’s Shy Dog ad.

The first example is from an article called “Rehabilitating Shy Dogs” on the website Suite101.com. Take a look at the screenshot:

Here’s another example from About.com which had an article entitled “Meeting the Shy and Fearful Dog”:

Note the differences from the search network. People are actively reading an article on a topic and may click on your ad, but you can see how the probability of someone clicking on an ad under these circumstances might be very different from someone who is searching. This is why the CTR on the content network is generally lower than on the search network.

Now, this doesn’t mean that one network is “better” than another. In general when I start a new campaign, I’ll advise folks to only enable the search network until they have a good feel for how the whole system works. You will rack up many, many impressions on the content network before you get any clicks, and since we’re testing out different keywords and different ads, I want clients to be able to get clicks quickly.

I’ve  read that people might use the content network when they’re trying to get brand recognition or name recognition – getting clicks might not be the primary goal. Since I’m not an advertising expert, I’ll leave that theory to them – but suffice to say that you’ll get many, many, many impressions on the content network before you get clicks. So don’t be surprised if that happens.

I’ve also read that folks believe the content network  with is more prone to click fraud. This is because in the content network are these pages that are known as “made for adsense” pages – pages that have virtually no real content.

In sum, if you’re new to Ad Words and starting a new campaign, turn on the search network and turn off the content network. Get a good feel for how the system works and which keywords really do bring you the most clicks for your money before turning on the content network. And always, always track your website traffic so that you can compare the number of clicks that you’re paying for versus what you’re getting.

Enjoy!

1. Starter Edition vs Standard Edition: I recommend clients start with the Google AdWords Standard Edition, versus the very simplified Starter Edition. You get much more control over your campaign and upgrading is free.
2. Remember your Goal: Customers, not just Clicks: Clicks cost you money, and if they aren’t converted into customers, there is no return on what you paid Google AdWords for that click. You are not just trying to accumulate clicks, you are trying to develop a campaign that attracts customers who are looking for exactly what you are selling.
3. Track Your Traffic: Set up an independent website traffic tracking tool that has the capability of identifying and segregating pay-per-click traffic. I can’t emphasize this enough. It will be impossible to calculate your return on investment (ROI) of your Google AdWords campaign if you don’t do this. I recommend Web-Stat to all my website clients, and it’s easy and simple to install. Don’t start a Google AdWords campaign without it! (Google AdWords also has a very impressive traffic tracking system called Google Analytics – it’s pretty complicated. But whatever you select, you simply must track your traffic if you’re paying for it!
4. Budget, CPC Bid, Impressions, Position. Learn about this using Google AdWords Help Center. Understand how these parameters do, and don’t interact with each other: Your CPC (cost per click) bid will change your position in the Sponsored Links list, but it will not affect the number of impressions (the times your ad is shown). Your budget will affect the number of impressions, but will not affect your position. You need both impressions and position to get clicks.
5. Learn about CTR. CTR stands for Click Through Rate, the ratio of number of clicks to number of impressions multiplied by 100 to get a percentage – and it’s generally small, like 1% to 3%. This means you may need 100 or more impressions to get a single click. The higher your CTR, the better, but again, you’ll need to convert these clicks to customers, so CTR isn’t the ultimate measure of Google AdWords campaign success.
6. Start With Very Few Keywords: Google AdWords is very sophisticated and has many built-in analysis tools. Start of with just one or two targeted keyword phrases, until you learn how the Google AdWords system works.
7. Match Ad Title and Content to Keywords or Services Offered. Go ahead and put your keywords into Google and see what comes up in the Sponsored Links. Notice how much there is to look at. How will your small ad capture the attention of the person who entered the keywords, and how will it ONLY capture their click if YOU are trying to sell what THEY are looking for?
8. Keyword Matching Strategy: Learn the difference between “broad match”, “exact match”, “phrase match”, and “negative match”. (Go here to watch a Google tutorial on keyword matching or here to read definitions of matching) Use these to filter exactly when you do, and don’t want your ad shown. (if you sell shoes, but not red shoes, you don’t want pay for “red shoe” clicks). Note partner sites use “broad matching”.
9. Estimate Search Traffic: Use this feature to determine how much to bid, to get good rankings. Target #1-#3, versus #4-#6, if you can afford it.
10. Where or When Are Your Customers? If your goal is to attract customers who are in a certain region, consider the differences between an ad that targets a city or a region. You can also specify the time of day your ads show.
11. Search Network vs Content Network. Google’s search network includes search engines like AOL, Ask.com and Earthlink. Google’s content network includes NYTimes.com, About, HGTV, etc. You can select whether you want your ad to appear only as a result of searches (on the search network) or on websites with content that’s relevant to your ad (content network) or both. They also offer “site-targeted ads” where you specify which websites you want your ad to appear on. If you’re starting out, I recommend sticking to the search network.
12. Pay Attention To Your Quality Score: I read a great article recently on Google AdWords Quality Score and why it’s important to pay attention to it and to work on improving it. AdWords isn’t simply a bidding war. You’ll get higher ad placement for less cost if your quality score is higher. Why? Because Google AdWords wants to serve ads that are relevent, just like Google the search engine does. How do you check your quality score? First, read this page from Google on Quality Score. Then go into your Ad Group, click on the Keyword tab, and hover your mouse over the magnifying glass icon. This will tell you your Quality Score for those keywords (in that particular campaign). To see all the Quality Scores for the Ad Group, click on “Customize Columns” and then select “Quality Score”…and presto, you can see the Quality Score for all your keywords at one time. The Quality Score categories are “poor” , “ok” and “great”.
13. Landing Pages: Google AdWords checks your landing pages, the pages that you send the click traffic to, to see how relevant it is to your ad. The more relevent the landing page, the higher your quality score and lower your bid. From a customer standpoint, it’s also better to have people land on the page that shows them what they were searching form versus your home page. If you have many products and pages, send them right to the page or category they searched for. The fewer clicks they have to make, the more likely they are to purchase.

I’ve had not-so-good experiences with other pay-per-click companies, but I think Google AdWords is excellent because they truly want you to succeed and give you many, many tools and tutorials to help you. You don’t commit to any long term contracts, and completely control your ads – you can start and stop them whenever you want to. If you’re interested in Google AdWords and would like some help getting started, please visit my page on Google AdWords Campaign Management and Consulting.

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.)

Signing up for an account was easy, although I was a little worried about the minimum monthly budget of $99. I’m a very small business with a very small advertising budget. Given that I was to be charged $1 per click, and given that my own search engine optimization efforts brought around 250 visitors to my website monthly, it seemed odd that Citysearch could bring me that much traffic. But since Citysearch reassured me I could delete my account at any time, I signed up. (Go here to read about search engine optimization and how it differs from pay-per-click.)

Since I’m a former engineer turned website designer, I love data. So I track my own website traffic meticulously. (Click here to find out how to track your website’s traffic – super important if you’re in a pay-per-click agreement!) For the first three days, nothing happened. But then strange traffic started appearing on my website tracking tool. Clicks from websites like “folksfound.net” “attpx.com” “redirect.clickshield.net” “folksfound.com” “seek4results.com” “bigapple.contextuads.com” “ppc.burnsearch.net” “arcadepod.com” “adrogo.com” “piqw.com” “dpxml.infospace.com” “peakc.com” “netquesting.com” for words unrelated to my website like “financial planning” and “MSN”. Every day, the number of these strange visitors increased. To my horror, the total number of these visits were exactly correlated to the clicks that Citysearch was charging me $1 per click for. After several days of this junk traffic, my account totaled $45, halfway to my preset $100 limit. The number of fraudulent clicks was increasing on a daily basis. At this rate, I would hit my $100 limit in a few more days! (Again, I wouldn’t have known this if I wasn’t tracking my website traffic…please go here to read about how to track the traffic on YOUR website)

Perhaps I was naive about click fraud or just curious, but I set about the task of going into some of these sites and trying to find what possible search or listing had directed people to my website. Although the number of junk visits and charges from Citysearch matched, I was still looking for proof that these junk visits had something to do with my Citysearch pay-per-click ad. What I found was awful. Many of these sites that visitors had come from were simply garbage directories and I was unable to find any listing that matched mine. However on a few, I was able to find the exact text that I had used in my Citysearch description….and so I knew without a doubt, that this junk traffic was related to my Citysearch ad. I now had the proof I needed to confront Citysearch. (Remember, you need to independently track your website traffic if you’re using a pay-per-click campaign to see if you’re getting your money’s worth…click here to learn how to track your website traffic.)

Three phone calls to Citysearch customer service resulted in nothing but frustration. They were unimpressed about my complaints of click-fraud even though their website said they had a whole Click Fraud organization. I offered to fax logs of my website traffic to their Click Fraud folks, but they weren’t interested. I was left no recourse but to close my account and argue for a refund, which I obtained.

All in all it was a horrible experience for me and I’ll certainly steer all of my clients away from Citysearch. I’ll also insist that they track their own traffic carefully when embarking on any online advertising scheme, especially pay-per-click. Remember to set up your own website traffic analysis tool before you embark on any online marketing venture to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for! It costs less than $10 per month to sign up with Web-Stat and usually takes me about an hour to install it on a client’s website. If you’re paying hundreds of dollars each month for pay-per-click traffic, please contact me about installing a website traffic tracking tool on your website.

Addendum: Read Daniel Krieger’s experience with Citysearch Pay Per Click Advertising, another unhappy customer.

Another Addendum: Read Jeff Cheap’s blog article Citysearch Click Fraud Warning.

Yet Another: Read “The Middlemen of Paid Search” – Which views SuperPages and Citysearch as middlemen in the pay-per-click foodchain. He recommends that small businesses avoid these middlemen and go straight to the source, Google Adwords (and I agree).

If you have a similar story, contact me and I’d be happy to link to it.