Posted on February 24, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Parked domain?
People who place ads though AdWords or Microsoft adCenter typically do so primarily because they want the chance to bring someone who has typed a relevant search query into Google, Yahoo or Bing to their website. What is not so well known is that roughly half of the money that is spent on AdWords or adCenter goes for clicks on ads that do not appear on search results pages, but instead appear on other websites.
AdWords and adCenter show ads on these non-search websites by default unless this feature is manually disabled. This approach, known as Contextual PPC, provides many more opportunities for ads to be seen and clicked than if they just appeared on search results pages, so it drives substantial revenue for Google and Microsoft, gives advertisers greater exposure, and helps website publishers monetize their content.
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Posted on January 6, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who's clicking your PPC ads?
There are various types of click fraud in online advertising. One form involves competitors clicking on your Pay Per Click ads. They do this to waste your budget on worthless clicks, discouraging you from continuing to advertise online. With typical per-click charges ranging from a few dollars to tens of dollars, it doesn’t take long to burn someone’s daily budget and take their ads off the air.
While both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter claim to refund charges for “suspicious” clicks, we have seen instances where consistent clicking by competitors has required manual requests for refunds. Both platforms allow IP address blocking of ads. Let’s review how this works to understand what can (and can’t) be accomplished with IP address blocking.
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Posted on December 16, 2010 by Hans Riemer
Are you trapped?
Recently we were called in to investigate a PPC account that had been migrated from Yahoo
Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. Since moving to adCenter, the account experienced a significant drop in ROI. They were still getting plenty of clicks but those clicks weren’t converting, which was badly hammering their cost-per-acquisition.
The company sells Christmas decorations from their website. They have an excellent web analytics tool that can track individual incoming visitors (which Google Analytics does not do) so it didn’t take us long to spot quite a number of paid clicks that spent almost no time on the site. We looked at the referring URLs to see where the ads were appearing that sent these visitors and discovered something very interesting about Microsoft adCenter PPC that’s potentially costing advertisers some real money.
In a moment, we’re going to explain what is occurring and tell you how to fix it if it is happening to you. This affects advertisers using adCenter as well as those who previously used Yahoo Search Marketing, because YSM is now managed through adCenter.
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