Penny-wise, pound-foolish. Sucker born every minute. Hindsight is 20/20. Whatever cliche you want to use, I shouldn’t have said yes.
Yep, a bargain ‘per click’ offer sucked me in from a low-performing, but reputable, B2B directory. At less than a quarter per click, I didn’t fear much. And for months I was right.
Who was this company? Somehow I feel it is too soon to say out loud. K*********h or Z**b, both owned by R**d Publications.
In a nutshell
When the prepaid account was refilled for the second time (they sent me a notice that my credit card was being billed), I got curious, but didn’t investigate closely. Time passed and the account refilled just often enough for me not to pay attention.
Finally, a couple weeks ago, I received another notice and dived in. Their back-end let me look at stats of clicks and I saw activity pegging the $10 max for almost every day. And there was no way of knowing where in their ‘network’ my text-ad was showing.
We changed the settings on the listing to make it show less frequently. I also called their service line and talked to a knowledgeable guy who offered to streamline the account.
Knowledgeable guy never calls or emails back, so today I dive in again. I knew it was bad, but had to prove it to myself.
I called knowledgeable guy to close the account. Of course he asks why, and I tell him that I suspect click fraud. He is willing to ‘explain’ but also willing to just let me have my way. No show-down, good or bad.
The analysis
What was my evidence, besides a sudden jump in charges? Their reporting, while lacking sources, gives enough info to make my skin crawl with ickiness.
Prior to August, average clicks per day was 2. What I see now is that the account would go for a couple days with no clicks then get two or more in one day. Most likely a human doing their ’rounds’ and trying to stay under the radar. And a click-thru rate of 1-2%, while nominal, is still very high for contextual advertising.
August 6th, impressions and clicks start to jump. CTR hovers around 2% on average, although a few days it hits 10%. Cost per day is now $2.48 a day, versus $0.34 for July. Maybe they’ve expanded their network? Improved relevance? Or someone is starting to get greedy.
So it goes for months, increasing slightly even occasionally maxing out at the daily $10 amount.
Then someone got greedy!
December 23rd until we tweaked our settings, nearly every day was a $10 day.
I pulled my Google Analytics ‘visits’ report and laid it next to K**h’s report. Even in August I show six days where their clicks would have been 20% (and two 50%+) of my sites traffic. Analytics showed nothing, of course. That means bots were doing the dirty work and not triggering Google’s javascript.
Here’s the killer: The new year holiday weekend:
| Day |
Clicks sent |
Total ‘visits’ per Analytics |
| 1/1/2010 |
43 |
35 |
| 1/2/2010 |
46 |
53 |
| 1/3/2010 |
47 |
76 |
So they sent 136 visitors that weekend, when my whole site had a 164? I don’t think so!
The reality
So where were these clicks coming from? I took fragments of our text-ad and googled them. After clicking on the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link that Google sometimes offers, I saw it was websites with *powerful* domain names such as furniturebestplus clothesbestresults blogfurniturezides , but each with multiple sub-domains. In all six pages of search results. These sites slickly morph their content based on the search text coming in, so I had to rely on Google’s cache to see my text-ad actually being displayed.
In the end it’s hard to tell if it was the publisher, or their network, that was at fault. Likely both. When talking to knowledgeable guy I told him I found my ad on ‘click farms’. He retorted “It depends what you mean by click farms, but if you mean parked domains, yes the ads can show there. Parked domains are pretty effective, actually.” Umyea, effective for them!
Constant vigilance
So, I didn’t lose a bunch of money, but I expect for the person(s) clicking, it is nice cha-ching! I could argue for it, but like most scams, it isn’t worth the effort.
And I had to swallow some humble pie to admit I made a bad choice. But I’ll feel better if my story helps someone out there. Someday soon I may add the real names and see what traffic the search-engines drive this way.
