PPC Our point of view
A company’s observation on Pay Per Click
Viper Logic takes a look into PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign operators, web sites that partner with PPC operators and their personal experiences when applying these campaigns to a services web site they own. We will share what we have found in regards to the temptations of clicking for income and techniques or tricks that we discovered to generate these click through for profit from web site owners. We will also discuss PPC operator’s accountability or lack there of.
PPC is everywhere
It is not often today while surfing around on the Internet looking at web sites, forums, social networks and blogs that we do not see these PPC advertisements and begin to wonder, if these are on every site we visit, are they effective anymore? Today there are also image display advertisements in addition to those text link advertisements.
What is PPC
PPC is short for Pay Per Click. How PPC works is a bidding and profit sharing system.
The Advertisers participation
This relationship begins when the advertiser opens an account as a PPC operator. They then bid on the keyword or keywords that best match their product or service. Depending on the demand or popularity for the keyword they want for their site, the bid per click price they will pay can range from a few cents to over $50.00 dollars per click. These are generally text link advertisements.
Search Engines participation
The search engines place the advertisements on their sites under the keywords the advertiser has bid for and successfully won. These ads appear at top or to the right of the returned search results page for the keyword displaying the advertiser text link advertisement. This area is usually titled “sponsored links” or “sponsor results”.
Search Engine Partner participation
This is where the problem in our opinion begins and is also where our look inside of PPC and fraud really escalates. PPC partners share in the revenue that each click directed though their sites generate. This can and does lead to very large amounts of money for both the PPC operators and the PPC partners.
Who offers these advertisements on their sites?
The search engines we described above offer paid PPC on every page under every keyword you can imagine. Then there are the search engine partner sites that also offer these advertisements.
Any site can literally sign up to offer PPC advertisements on their sites. There are rules and there is an approval process to be able to offer these advertisements. It is really easy to do and this can be done from anywhere on the planet.
Traffic wise, any owner that has a site can display PPC advertisements ranging from a few hits a day to over 100,000+ visitors per day. It becomes clear that the more traffic a site has, the higher the odds of a site visitor clicking on these display advertisements. When a site has less traffic in our opinion, it is when the click fraud begins. Low traffic equals low advertisement click rates.
Keywords Defined
A keyword is the word(s) a person searching the Internet would type into their favorite search engine to find the product or service they are seeking. An example of a keyword as in our case is “Email Marketing” because we are a web based email marketing software service provider.
Who offers PPC partnerships
Search Engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN Live and ASK are the more popular ones. There are also stand alone companies that offer PPC opportunities as well. There are way too many to list them like Bidvertiser.com and Miva.com but to see more of these PPC offers, you can go to your favorite search engine and type in “Pay Per Click Services” or even “Pay Per Click” and the list takes off from there.
We wonder how accountable the PPC operators are?
We understand that the ability to track a click is within the hands of the PPC operators but for some reason, they do not offer it clearly to the advertiser who is paying for these Pay Per Click Campaigns.
In our opinion they are not offering these details because the results or ROI (Return on Investment) is too low based on the bidding amount for the keywords that the advertiser is selecting to have their advertisements displayed under.
How honest are the partner site operators that offer PPC advertisements?
We are aware that we are all mostly on the Internet to make money. When you are the site owner, there is going to be a constant draw to get clicks though to those advertisements and make the owner some steady money/income. Remember that someone operating a site in a foreign country, even if the site is hosted in Europe or the United States can be a partner of a PPC operator. We believe a site owner that lives in a foreign country where small amounts of money are a lot of money in their country put this whole PPC concept at an even greater risk of trickery and ultimately fraud.
Viper Logic begins investigating
Viper Logic joins forums discussing PPC topics. We became members of web master forums with global membership and these forums have a large portion of their forums devoted to PPC campaigns, advertising, marketing and a lot of other information of interest to web masters. We began to look into the conversations of PPC partner operators on these forums and realized how much a few dollars a day is to some of these people and what they are willing to do to generate this money regularly.
We ran our PPC advertising campaign on two of the top four search engines and we tracked the campaigns with tools built by Viper Logic. We of course also used the common web site traffic tracking tools but we took it to another level to more clearly track the PPC campaign by building our own knowledge tracking tools.
Why did we wait one year to report our findings
Lately we are experiencing a very abnormally large amount of PPC trickery tactics and this led us to reopen our investigation into the PPC operator’s practices. Lets start out by explaining that to us, PPC campaigns are equal to ordering a sandwich filled with mystery meat as you never know what you are going to get. We do believe and are active advertisers online. We advertise daily so we understand the power of advertising. What we do not believe in is offering our advertising dollars out for anyone to click away on with no accountability as the PPC operator industry clearly and currently are not correctly offering in our opinion.
Media coverage of Pay Per Click Fraud
We realize that the subject of PPC fraud or suspicious activity by the media has produced plenty of articles about the subject. What is hard to understand is the lack of coverage into these practices considering the large amounts of annual revenue the PPC operator industry produces.
Viper Logic PPC campaign experiences
If you have not tried it and you have not experienced the use of applying PPC campaigns for your product or service, you may not know how these PPC campaigns work. Viper Logic has operated in the past, a PPC campaign over an extended period of time in 2007 for 3 and 4 months otherwise we would not be able to write this story. There are a lot of factors about using PPC campaigns and we wanted to see what we could uncover by utilizing our custom built IP and URL tracking tools.
What kinds of click through strategies or gimmicks has Viper Logic experienced.
We have exposed and will detail below some blog comment stuffing, 100% PPC no content sites that appear to be a blog, event calendar stuffing, and some abnormally high traffic from PPC provider partner sites.
Blog Comment Stuffing
In April 2008 Logic began this very Blog you are reading today and is one of the over 100 million blogs occupying the Internet today. We began getting SPAMMED in our comments section and these would be 5, 10, 20, even 30 outbound links that had a famous search engine in the URL with the .com ending followed by keywords in one case laptop, and computer some numbers and letters. Out of curiosity we clicked on a few of these links and they took us straight through a website PPC and directly to that advertisers web site. Today we are now blocking these posts as there was nothing going to be bought from the advertiser so the only one gaining is the PPC operator and the PPC partner.
100% PPC Sites
Logic now being a blog operator is a member of the top blog directories. In a search in these blog directories under marketing for example would click on a blog and in several cases for the little time spent looking at other blogs continuously came across and not to be confused with parked pages sites that looked like a blog format but there was only PPC links completely filling the entire page. This would be easy to have visitors click on these exciting advertisement titles only to be taken to a PPC advertiser’s web site. In all fairness the blog directories are filled with parked pages perhaps blogs with domain names that had expired and became parked pages.
SQL Injection Hacks
SQL Injection is a hacking method used by hackers to insert new data or corrupt existing data in the database used by a company’s website. In our past experience with some of our customer’s websites that we host, the hackers simply corrupted the database using this SQL Injection method. However in the past year, we have seen this hack method used for inserting scripts into the database so that when a user is viewing the infected website, the scripts get executed on their browser. We initially thought these scripts were very dangerous and were written to corrupt data, attack or gain access to the user’s computer but to our surprise, the script simply causes the user’s browser to execute a PPC advertisement. The process is more complex and beyond the scope of this document but the point is that these types of hacks that were once focused on corrupting data or gaining access to a user’s computer are now being used for monetary gain through PPC advertisements.
PPC Directories
We have seen PPC operator partner arrangements with directory owners where the site partner is operating as a full directory and not a web site. This would not be a big deal except the wording used on these directories and the amount of clicks generated by these directories is unrealistic. The results in our case received no orders not even for a free no risk or obligation trial sign up.
We reviewed our service product
We thought that perhaps our service which at the time was $19.95 per month was not calling to action or that we had a service that needed more features or glamour. However looking at the competition in our category of Email Marketing, they were not only doing very well but they were even going public so the service was good. Meanwhile we had been signing up new clients each week utilizing other online marketing strategies. This to us verified that the service product ViperMailer.com, is a good solution and you can see it here email marketing.
PPC Credibility
What we have begun to see is some attempts to provide deeper tracking by these PPC providers. We know that one is offering reports on click through to where these clicks are coming from and they are doing this domestically to start. One other PPC provider offers its clients the ability to block up to 100 or more partner web sites from your account as well. This sounds good but there are significantly more than 100 sites to take the place of these you block which in our opinion is like a cat and mouse game.
Pay Per Click verification system suggestion
Why do we accept no PPC accountability?
We wonder why the PPC campaigns do not offer an itemized billing statement that breaks down the IP (Internet Protocol) address and referral URL (the web site the click came from). We further wonder why this mystery is permitted by advertisers because we are living in a technological time that makes it fairly easy to provide us with these detailed itemized PPC billing statements.
PPC campaigns billing should work like phone bills
We are all familiar with our monthly phone bills that detail all the charges for that service period. The phone service provides also go to great length in itemizing all incoming and outgoing calls, long distance calls, services, etc. Why don’t we expect or demand the same from the PPC campaigns billings?
Viper Logic Note
We enjoy the ability to have a broad range of marketing tools to help build and grow our business including Pay Per Click. However it is in our opinion that PPC needs to bring out the reporting methods suggested above in the form of their billing statements for the good or the bad. We know from experience that when we buy advertisements that are on a flat monthly rate, these advertisements do not see the kind of click through rates that our PPC campaign received. We understand that the PPC operators have access to higher traffic sites through their partners and that this might in part be why the PPC advertisements bring us more clicks, however even this seems to be suspicious to us. There is also this finding in that a PPC partner site would bring more traffic to our product then the actual PPC operator being that the PPC operator is the highest traffic sites on the planet. Perhaps it is because the PPC partner site is more focused but we did not find that to be true.
What do you think?
We would value your input.