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I just had 2 ideas.
1. We built a website outlining the fraud and all of the evidence. Then every member on here links to it, to that it ranks high under internet marketing, PPC search engine, or anything anyone who is considering advertising these engines will look for.
2. Same thing as above, but we advertise it on Overture and Google adwords as a warning. Even if we bid $2.00 a click but split the cost by twenty it could be cheap.
It would take some effort but it might be worth it. In the end it would hit thier bottomline.
Antoine
Wow! A lot to reply to.
First, on what Randy is saying, I agree and disagree. I just feel that regardless if I can manage a decent ROI, I don’t want my ad dollars going to anyone who makes a career out of cheating me. I don’t like supporting it, I don’t like having to monitor it, don’t like going back and forth with the engines over it and I don’t like my numbers getting all mixed up…
I like knowing that when I stay on top of everything, I net over $1 a click and that some random spike isn’t going to put me in the negative for the day. I’d gladly pay more for that piece of mind (thanks Overture and Google).
I also think the more people know, the more the engines will be forced to play straight, because the free market isn’t doing it. A great example is GoClick, mentioned by a few others here as full of fraud (I’ve had some as well, but John was decent about sorting it out), was just sold for $12.5 million…
Like you said, you’re not defending the fraud, so I’ll leave off.
Elizabeth, there are a lot of bots that hit your site (Googlebot, Slurp, MSNBot, ia_archiver and so on). Not all are click bots. If you can, direct your PPC traffic to tracking links whenever possible. This will help distinguish between normal traffic and what you;re paying for. Without knowing your logs, that’s the best I can tell you, but congrats on asking the engines what’s up!
The mention of GoClick reminds me of another type of fraud; bait and switch. A GoClick partner had an adult thumbnail gallery. At the top of each page it had links to “Gallery #2”, “Gallery #3”, “Gallery #4” and “Gallery #5”. At least one of the links was pointing to one of my finance pages and being charged as a click…
Originally posted by Captain
I still feel if the major ppc advertisers would join together just once and boycott it would open the ppc owners eyes.I just paused ALL my Go Click accounts !!!
I have always thought they were cheating – now I know!
I also wrote them – I will be asking for a full refund if they dont take appropriate action!
Hell they (ppcs) are probably running some of those PTR sites!
I can name several PTR owners who own search engines and I think one or two are listed in Øystein’s article, so yes, you’re correct in that.
This summer we went through a spate where a whole bunch of insane PTRs opened up that could not possibly pay their members with the prices they were selling ads for – so they didn’t, they just shut down leaving the clickers high and dry – I guess the theory being if you’re gonna screw the SE advertisers, why not screw the people clicking up the money for you too? Grrr. That makes me angry too, cos a lot of these folks are disabled, pensioners, unemployed – they’re clicking for fractions of pennies if they get paid at all, and the PTR owners and SE affs are getting rich off of them too. And a lot of the clickers really don’t realise how the ‘food chain’ works, so to speak. Some do, yes, but the vast majority have no idea.
But…these sham PTR proggies made tens, more likely hundreds of thousands, by sending out one search advert after another to memberships averaging 10 – 15,000 – say 200 search adverts a day for an average proggie lifespan of three months.
There are several hosting companies that host both the PTRs and the SEs, and also own SEs. Lachlann McGregor owns Hosting2NV (hosting company), as well as owning SearchDrifter (search engine). Hosting2NV is a big provider of hosting for both PTRs and SEs. Lucidity Hosting is set up in a similar way, and I believe they own a search engine but I can’t remember which one.
Then there are services like:
http://www.getaportal.com
http://www.getportals.comTo see what’s really going on at that second one, hit:
http://www.getportals.com/en.htmNot to mention that some of the search affiliates, whilst not owning PTRs themselves, get literally hundreds of members in their downlines at both the search engines and the PTRs. When Øystein and I ran the numbers, we both almost fainted. It’s low-balled in the report, but these people are raking in anywhere from $100k to up to $750k a month.
Some of that didn’t come to light til after the original report was done – this thing seems like – the more you investigate, the worse it all gets.
Yup – it really is that rotten.
Originally posted by antoine
I just had 2 ideas.1. We built a website outlining the fraud and all of the evidence. Then every member on here links to it, to that it ranks high under internet marketing, PPC search engine, or anything anyone who is considering advertising these engines will look for.
2. Same thing as above, but we advertise it on Overture and Google adwords as a warning. Even if we bid $2.00 a click but split the cost by twenty it could be cheap.
It would take some effort but it might be worth it. In the end it would hit thier bottomline.
Antoine
The original article is at http://www.marketingcynic.com/ppcfraud – there’s maybe 20 megs of downloadable evidence there and quite a few links – and we’ve got maybe 200, 300 megs more PDF’d offline – there just wasn’t room to put it all up.
I’ve got the original mirrored on one of my domains as well, and yes, there does need to be a follow-up – as you can see the original runs about 12 pages, excluding evidence.
So give a shout to Øystein if you want to co-ordinate something there. It probably can be done, and no sense re-inventing the wheel.
Oh – and somebody over at Warriors forum also put up the article at: http://www.stopclickfraud.com/
So he’d be a good person to talk to as well.
Hi
I’d sure be willing to contribute to Ant’s suggestion. I am in complete agreement with him that IMHO we’d make a bigger splash taking out ads than we’d ever do contacting the PPCs on an individual basis, and I say that being a large spender at them.
I know I’d get the same BS that goclick used as posted here. Yes, despite spending literally $1000s of dollars a month at PPCs, they’d not even blink an eye to see me pull my accounts.
I know, I’ve tried.
But you start having warning ads show up when people do a search for pay per click search engines, or similar; and I’d bet it would accomplish getting their attentions.
I would also be willing to support this. As bb1webs stated only one person pulling ads does not doe any good. Still a mass boycott for a set period of time would send a clear message. I am still leaving all my ppc account off line for a period of time, because with all of this fraud the ROI is just not there.
I have also taken mine off-line. I will monitor here to see what the concensus is about the mass action.
Hey Everyone,
I am making a firm commentment to not use any ppc advertising at least through October 9th. When I return from Vegas I will review what effect by taking this action has had and post results soon after I return.I would love to join you but have stopped using them a couple months ago already.
I have been doing a complete revamp of my main site and much better SEO, which is still in progress.
I really haven’t noticed that much decline in earnings, the number of high value players has increased and the number of low value players has decreased.
I guess the results of this boycott will look different for everyone.
1. We built a website outlining the fraud and all of the evidence. Then every member on here links to it, to that it ranks high under internet marketing, PPC search engine, or anything anyone who is considering advertising these engines will look for.
i can send links.
!#”¤#” Service Pack 2 crashed my computer – thank God for friends with rescue disks. Even if getting back took a while.
It’ll probably be best if the link building strategy focuses on stopclickfraud.com – I’ll have a talk with Floyd Fisher who set it up and see if we can’t set up a mailing list there too, for wider coordination of our efforts. It’s probably better to keep the efforts focused on a site set up specifically to inform about the problem instead of muddling the issue by directing to one of my domains set up to try to draw some of the PTR clickers away from being part of the click fraud machine by giving them a strategy for starting something real for themselves instead of clicking their lives away at the computer.
It’s sort of a two-pronged effort really, drain away the brute manpower of the people performing the false clicks for the fraudsters by directing them into more constructive avenues like affiliate programs and eBay, and starve the scammers from above by cutting them off from easy money from the search engine advertisers by forcing the feeds to clamp down on the way they organize the fradulent traffic.
Because even the affiliate programs and traffic partnerships of the search engines aren’t really the problem – it’s the fact that they don’t react to obvious abuses like their affiliates advertising through PTR programs and essentially paying people to search; or not enough at any rate. It appears that last year they clamped down on paid-to-search sections in those programs to the point where only a few of them still have them up and running – but they failed to ban the implicit incentivising of searches by banning all the paid-to-read programs.
Essentially, PTR is a major locus for the click fraud – without them the ones committing the fraud would have a harder time gathering the neccesary manpower to do it on such a large scale as the current state lets them.
And until the feeds and engines clamp down on that stuff, advertisers are gonna keep on being bled to the point of pain.
Yes, fraud’s always gonna be a risk and a cost of doing business, but removing a major locus is going to keep it more under control. Because fraud’s a discincentive to perform in an economically rational manner in any economy; and as for the search engines they really should understand that it creates bottom-race conditions where the advertisers are not bidding rationally to maximise profits from their products but to minimise fraud loss on their advertising.
In other words, there’s a reason why any functioning economy tries their level best to clamp down on parasitic economic behaviour like fraud and protection rackets – it’s not good for society as a whole since the only choice for the businesses is to pass the cost of fraud on to the consumer. In other words, massive fraud such as this costs everyone in the long run.
By the way – ever seen Kanoodle unbilled_click in your logs? That’s the fourth and subsequent click from a PTR searcher on your ad that day; and that’s one of the mechanisms that’s been used to hide the fraud from you all.
Of course, you get twit answers like this:
well this Norwegian is not serious. he wants to build a business on click fraud information.
u do marketing for him.
no thx. we need non-profit action not one more guy selling ebooks about marketing.
Err, no – I ain’t selling this info; if I was I’d have made something like http://www.whosclickingwho.com/ – if you read their ad copy they clearly know about where the major part of the fraud is coming from and developed a solution to cash in on it instead of making their information public.
Me, I spendt four months on this instead of ignoring it and keeping on with my major job as a freelance copywriter – instead of writing sales copy for clients, I’ve been documenting this fraud.
Or you get even less helpful responses like
SOMEONE’S MAKING A LOT OF MONEY FROM YOUR PPC BUDGET-
WHAT A PITY IT ISN’T YOUReally?
Well, I hope all of my competitors join the boycott.
Sure – have fun being the only guy paying the PPC engines, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did when the PTR frausters chewed through my accounts in a few days. ‘Cause – you know what? If the rest of us pull out – guess who’s gonna be the only worthwhile target for the scammers?
So it doesn’t much matter if that guy isn’t feeling the pain right now, because the more people pull out from the PPC engines, the more pain the people who are left will feel when the frausters start running out of targets.
It gets lonely out in the open, you know?
Of course, if he sticks with Google and Overture he’s prolly gonna be much less of a target; the fraud isn’t hitting them as hard – yet.
Although Google has some ways to go when it comes to reining in publishers making minimal sites and advertising them through PTR – and Overture feeds out to Bannerfox who feeds out to Blazerunner – and Blazerunner is very, very popular in the PTR world.
If the other feeds rein in their affiliates… well, the fraudsters aren’t going to go away until something is done about the whole Paid-to-read thing and the easy money the search affiliates are making from them…
Actually when we split this up, I think I ended up joining a bunch more PTRs than you did. Most of them I’ve been able to dump, thankfully, but I have held onto a couple for the sake of evidence, and paid-to-search sections are still going strong.
It’s a Saturday, so the money ones aren’t up today – usually at week-ends it’s just points, but points convert to cash, etc. On one of them I couldn’t get the whole ‘Paid to Search’ to fit, but look at the banners, you’ll get an idea:
http://www.decadentsecrets.net/halloweenpts.jpg
http://www.decadentsecrets.net/hillbillypts.jpgThe Halloween one goes on for two or three pages, Hillbilly’s goes on for – 15 or 20 pages? Yikes!
Originally posted by arkyt
Where can one find a comprehensive listing of PPC engines being abused in this manner? Shall I assume that EVERY PPC is being taken advantage of and/or are in partnerships with the clickers/ptr programs?Furthermore, what are THEY, ( the ppc engines) doing to prevent this and provide a legitimate service? What evidence do you are anyone else have that these scammers are direct cohorts and/or colluding with the search engines Google /overture/yahoo/any-all PPC ?
The ppc se doesn’t have to be connected to pay2click programs themselfs, but most likely it’s their affiliates that does those things.
Cheaters are getting more sophisticated and using various scripts to try to ‘beat’ the ppc se script. Ppc se’s update their scripts and manually check affiliates for cheats. Anyone with a half decent program will do what they can to prevent cheats.
Someone also wrote that ppc se’s don’t care if pay2click programs are using their links since they get paid. As a ppc se owner I have to disagree with that. Not everyone is out for a quick buck, but trying to build up a solid business that will last.
My 2 clicks errr cents
Go Click provided me with the same BS canned response ..
“We regularly monitor for these type of activities as well as other fraudulant activities… our top goal is traffic quality. If we didn’t keep quality up we would not have 23,000+ advertisers and increasing bid prices — our advertisers would leave quickly.”
DONT let this die out – take action now – continue to post on EVERY forum you can find – EDUCATE the non-educated public that are currently unaware of the extents of click fraud.
