Advertising Click Fraud
If you’re using AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called “click fraud”. But what exactly is click fraud and how is it accomplished?
Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the attempt to have people clicking the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.
There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google’s AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.
One of the most complex is through the use of so called “hitbots”. These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some that actually click the banners as well).
Google’s AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and nearly anyone can find the details of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.
Another, more rudimentary method is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these people will actually sit all day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from very poor countries like India, and they’re prepared to do so for just $0.50 an hour.
Of course, there’s a problem with this mechanism. Once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.
To prevent this from happening, many people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What’s even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.
And don’t think this happens only in isolated instances. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.
In fact there’s so much that if search engine companies don’t increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behavior could become more become even more damaging.
Google has a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there’s certainly room for a lot of improvement.
It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.
There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other’s links (which is referred to as “clicking rings”, or spamming people so that they click such links.
Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google’s AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.
There are some means of protection against such schemes and all advertisers should be savvy enough to employ them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for fear of click fraud.
Categories: Business - Career, Starting a Business Tags: AdSense, AdSense publishers, click fraud
Adsense – Pros and Cons
You have that site on-line for quite a while, its generating a good number of hits every day and you’re thinking whether or not to use AdSense advertising on it to make it generate some form of income.
Well this is a description of the pros and cons of this approach to Internet advertising. AdSense has definitely hit the Internet like something from another planet and people are very excited about it everywhere. There are negative aspects to Adsense and alternatives to consider.
AdSense is generally a great tool for webmasters. Whereas, they would use to worry about how to raise enough money to keep their sites profitable, or at least keep them on-line those worries are gone.
AdSense allows webmasters to forget about those worries and concentrate on creating good content for their sites. In fact, the emphasis is now on creating quality content (often associated with the top-paying words) which will bring you many visitors.
AdSense can also very well integrated with your website, it’s easily customizable in terms of colors, size and position which means you can experiment with it in any way you like to maximize your income.
AdSense is a very good means of generating a constant revenue on your site. All you need to do is create some quality content and keep it updated constantly and you can literally live off your website. A lot of people are doing just that nowadays with AdSense, so it’s become sort of a business in itself.
It’s also a great program because you can have the same account advertising on all your pages. This is great for webmasters wit a lot of content because it means they don’t have to create many accounts unnecessarily.
But as stated, above, there are some negative aspects to advertising with AdSense and here’s a small list of such cons.
Clearly the largest negative impact the AdSense program can have on you is through Google closing your accounts. Most of the time this happens because of so called ‘click fraud’, which means somebody would be producing artificial clicks on your page.
There’s one really nasty side to that. It doesn’t have to be you making those artificial clicks. It could very well be your competition doing this in order to shut you down, or the competitor of whoever is advertising on your page, looking to drive their marketing costs up.
The earning AdSense brings you are by no means constant. In fact, they’re not even close to that. Anything you do to your site could end up being a big mistake costing you a great deal of money. It’s that kind of pressure that has a negative impact on you.
First of all, you constantly need to make sure your site is in the spotlight of search engines when people are searching for whatever it is your site is about.
If you fail to do that you won’t have any visitors, and that of course means you won’t have any AdSense revenue. In a way this is nothing new, as any form of generating revenue on the Internet with advertising has such a drawback.
And finally, another major problem is that you constantly have to feed your site with better and better content. Now, of course, certain sites are very well geared towards doing this but with some types of content this is rather hard to achieve. This is often why the services of a copywriter are employed to generate more and more content.
When writing original content, the best thing a website owner can do is research a topic thoroughly and then return to writing with lots of information they can out in their own words, and show their own opinion on.
So there are the pros and cons of using the AdSense network for generating profits through advertising. Now the choice of whether or not these work for you is yours.
Categories: Business - Career, Starting a Business Tags: AdSense, advertising
Google Adsense and the Surfer
AdSense is an easy program to grasp: it’s a great form of an advertising bringing a lot of benefits to every person in the chain. And of course, seeing the results it can have on a business (and a publisher) people encourage this form of publicity.
For the browsing audience this is probably the most straightforward model available, because they can be directed to a lot of new sites they wouldn’t have otherwise found. Needless to say, if you have an AdSense banner on your site, and a large number of visitors you’ll know it offers a great financial benefit.
But why does it work for the people clicking the links, as opposed to a standard approach?
It is aided by today’s society. With bloggers and information based articles on the internet, people may be encouraged to complete purchases, which adsense can provide links to relevant suppliers whilst also benefiting the publisher.
And the good thing about this is that it works for site visitors as well. In fact Google realized that by pleasing the people who are looking for something, and directing them to what they need faster, everybody wins.
It is because of this that a lot of websites promote through AdSense in both content and search. They do it because they ultimately learned that it works for everyone.
If we look in the past, we can realize that this kind of publicity has a great impact over the people, especially in the last few years. When we enter on a web site and we see a graphical banner, our first idea is to cancel it out of our mind, because it’s of no concern to us.
That’s why traditional banner advertising is wrong. It’s precisely because people are becoming savvy that they don’t look at a flashy banner because they think they’ll be losing their time with it.
We’ve gotten accustomed to banners that don’t interest us. And we’re accustomed to them having nice graphics. So we naturally associate the two things and think that a banner with nice graphics has nothing to tell us.
But we might look at a text-ad because we’ve grown accustomed to them being targeted at what we’re looking for. Basically these advertisements have marketed themselves into being looked at by any visitor.
This is a typical “no fluff, just stuff” situation. And in the end it means the visitors will see what they’re interested in, not some random cool graphics you throw at them.
As stated above, site visitors adopt this advertising mechanism, because it is efficient in leading them to pages of interest and can offer ton of things they really want to see. Someone coming across an article on adsense was probably looking for shoes or doing research on shoes when they came across the article.
And most importantly for everyone, including visitors, this scheme can only improve as the process gets further refined to make ads more relevant to what you’re looking for, not just a couple of keywords on a site.
Nowadays, it is because of AdSense that Internet surfers are looking after more interesting related things from banners, and the companies behind the site (Google and the advertiser) need to have better ideas to display, as expectations have increased a great deal.
So could “Do no evil” actually work in today’s cut throat competitive marketplace? Well, as you can see it can and it does. And you, as a visitor are the one who gets to enjoy this the most. Advertising becomes less of a burden and more of a benefit, and is still a benefit you can choose to ignore.
Less obtrusive banners; banners that you’re actually likely to be interested in and click means you’ll be less annoyed by surfing the web and feel like you as a visitor being offered a relevant service.
Although some may feel reluctant to read articles that are there purely to compel consumers, undoubtedly without this consideration they are useful. Ultimately the adverts mean that you don’t have to go back to your homepage every time you are compelled to complete a purchase.
Categories: Business - Career, Starting a Business Tags: AdSense, google Adsense
