Citisearch has been sued for not responding to clickfraud in their PPC results. Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP filed a lawsuit today against Citisearch company for abusing their own system by Click fraud.

"Citysearch, part of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is headed by Barry Diller, pays commissions to its salespeople based on the number of clicks their customers' ads receive, providing an incentive for click fraud, according to the lawsuit. Furthermore, the suit contends, contrary to Citysearch's own representations to its advertisers, it takes no real steps to prevent click fraud. And when customers become victims of click fraud, Citysearch fails to adequately advise them that they have been victimized or refund the money paid to Citysearch for that fraudulent activity.

The lawsuit seeks to represent all people or entities in the United States who paid money for pay-per-click advertising through Citysearch.com. "

Kabateck is a well known attorney in PPC industry. He recently won a Multi million dollar lawsuit against Yahoo and was part of a 90$ million dollar lawsuit against Google. So i am sure he will make City Search pay for it too.

Source here

Labels: pay per click

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

Many have a problem with ads whether to make the first letter caps or not. From my experience it doesn't matter whether the first character in any word is caps or now there won't be any difference in conversions.

Say if you have 2 Ads with same keywords one saying Perfume and other perfume Google Adwords will treat both these versions in a different way. Both ads will split the impressions and clicks between them. Eventually only one Ad will be shown.

Splitting the impressions and clicks just for 1st letter change is IMO insane i recommend testing both versions for sometime install good conversion tracking see which one converts better and drop the other version all together.

thanks,
SEG

Labels: PPC management

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

Yahoo Search Submit pro does offer an option where you can set a fixed CPC like 30 cents of something and use it for all the keywords in your campaign. Similarly i know exact seek does it. There are not many PPC search engines which offer this kind of stuff. I know Yahoo search submit does this since we do it for a particular client.

To qualify for Search Submit pro you need to have a budget spend of atleast 5000$ a month. Anything less than that will come under Search Submit Basic.

How it Works
You provide an XML feed of your URLs.
Your URLs are reviewed for quality and relevance. Approved URLs are then included in the index that powers algorithmic search results for Search Submit partner sites such as Yahoo! Search, AltaVista and AllTheWeb.
When Internet users visit the Search Submit Pro partner sites and enter keyword searches, your listings may appear within the search results based on their relevance to the user's search request.
Your content is kept up-to-date by frequent refreshes, typically every 48 hours. This ensures that potential customers view the latest offerings on your Web site.

Labels: yahoo search marketing

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

Well I just saw this post and believe me it took me by surprise a member in digital point forums asks regardless of the amount he wants to get maximum visitors to his website. He wants more than 10,000 valid visitors in 24 hours. I feel people like him are the ones who make Google rich.

This is his post
"i dont mind content network/search networkwhich niche its easy to get clicks from adwords..i need around 10000 visitors per day..what keywords and max bids i choose?what niche but i need only usa canada uk aus traffic..anybody can help"

He had a very detailed follow up down the thread it says

"well other then adword where i can get 10000 visitors a day.. or 20000 visitors a dayahh not the PTC sites like bux.toi dont want to be a sucker all day doing seo freebies linkexchange etc.. only to see some 300-500$ month with no gurantee of future..i dont want to get 20000 visitors in like 30 days..i want to see this business as real business..according to my calculation20000 usa visitors clicks =$1000 (5cent per click) (not the adult niche)so if i can buy traffic cheap and get them to click .. (what ever niche it is what ever site they want . it can be copied from goodones or outsourced to build the one visitors looking for)Dont tell me i have to be a niche guru.. i can go to any good niche forum and get the highest viewed threads..and i can get the conent easily and be the next niche guru..Dont tell me how much i have to invest in advertising to get 20000 visitors per day.. and i will make big loss.. I have all sort of option to cut the cost to 60%i am not here to become a webmaster .. i am a businessman.I mean business.. and continous business.. I dont care what i have to invest..i have seen few pharma affiliates making 15k monthly with hired bulk mail servers and purchased online pharma buyers email listbut i dont want to start anything illegal.. or spam..so many years and you guys even dont know what niche can get billions or millions of visitors per day? what keywords get billions or millions of visitors per dayinternet marketing gets 10000 visitors easy? i think this is 100% scam.. webmasters are not even 600 000 in total.. and most are dead.. and engaged in other stuff then webmastering..or is it just the todays top news keywords only gets billions of visitors per day and mostly from utube bbc and other news site?what i want to do ispush 20000 traffic per day to 1 website (from a good adnetwork not bux.to)600 000 traffic in 30 days..reduce the cost of advertising via blackhat methods..burn my bank balance..and see how much i made in 30 dayshow much affiliate commission how much in pay per click ads.. how much pay per play how much pay per signup how much pay per sale etc etc.."

I still doubt whether he is really looking for visitors or just fishing around for information

Labels: pay per click, PPC management

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

I heard a forum member ask this following question

"I notice that sometimes the same user will hit the same ad multiple times within seconds of each other,

here's a recent one:3:02:55pm 2:58:55pm 2:58:22pm Doesn't look like a bot, perhaps a confused user? So two questions1) Does Google Adwords charge me for each time this guy hits the ad in this span of time?2) If Google does, is there a way to prevent this person from seeing my ad after say the 2nd time they viewed it (Probably not)"

The answer for this Yes Google does detect multiple click from same IP in a short period of time. In order for Google to detect fraud clicks the clicks should be above a particular threshold level. if its just 2 or 3 clicks Google will mostly ignore it unless it happens regularly from the same IP or IP range.

TO prevent this

1. You can just block that particular IP in your adwords control panel.
2. Report to Google about the fraud activity from that IP
3. Turn off your adwords account for sometime and see what happens.

If Google detects any fraud activity they mostly refund the amount charged for fraud clicks. I feel there is nothing to worry about this issue.

Labels: google adwords

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

A webmaster world member tells the frustration he faces with yahoo search marketing and his PPC campaign with yahoo.

He says

"I've been away for a bit but decided to get my fellow members input on something that just pisses me off to NO END.

I advertise with Yahoo Search Marketing and have for a while now and I noticed last week that my account wasn't performing right. Low conversions, high impressions, low click through rates...around 0.70 when I usually experience about 2.00.

My rep is a GREAT GUY and has really helped me in the past and told me it was probably market fluctuation and try to wait a few days....I did what I was told and notice yesterday that my click through rates have plummeted even further...conversions were horrible and impressions were through the ROOF...about 170,000 impressions as of 2pm cst when in a normal day I would get 40 - 50,000 TOPS. I started digging and noticed that some of the keywords were INCREDIBLY OBSCURE and stuck out like a sore thumb...naturally I disabled them...about 20 or so...I'm talking some of these keywords would have 30 or 40,000 impressions....keywords that normally get minimal impressions.

What happened?

It did what it set out to do...my traffic was slaughtered b/c over the few days these false impressions gave the overall impression my account was performing poorly therefore lowering my ad placement and giving more weight to other ads with better click through...giving these ads higher placement with lower costs and driving down the competition.

I initially talked to yahoo about this and was told there was nothing that could be done other than shutting off the keywords...WHICH I DID. BUT, the damage is done...I sent an email to my rep trying to get management involved to solve this problem...it just SUCKS they do not have measures in place to protect us loyal advertisers from THIEVES.

"

I can understand his frustration we did face similar problems with yahoo but not anymore our clients accounts are running smoothly.

Labels: yahoo search marketing

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

Many of us would like to have Pay per click ad serving scripts. There are some pretty good ad serving scripts available in market some of them are pretty popular.

We do have some open source ad servers too best of them is http://www.openx.org/ its an amazing ad serving server which can be installed pretty easily. The scripts behind openx is easy to run.

Some paid scripts are Pay Per click Ad serving Script,
Inclick PPC ad server
AJ PPC ad serving script etc.

We will be adding more to this link keep checking this post

Labels: pay per click, PPC management

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

Recently one of our client account was badly hit with lower Quality score. It was difficult to figure out what the possible reason is. Quality score of some 200 keywords suddenly went poor which is not health for our campaign. We researched a bit and found in some forums people facing similar problems. Most probable reason most of the advertisers guess is the problem with the landing page.
If the Adwords Bot visits the site when the website is down Google adwords slap the account and relevant keywords with a Poor quality score. We do agree with this point since the site we are working on was down for about 2 days due to hosting problems and since it was a weekend we didnt pause the campaign and it resulted in bad quality score. But the status retured back to Good when the site was live back again.
So be careful when your site goes down its important to pause the campaign is something like this happens.

PPC blog team

Labels: Adwords, adwords ppc

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Comscore released their latest data on Search Engine Market share. As usual Google is way ahead of their competitors. Currently Google is No.1 with 61% market share according to Comscore. Yahoo is trailing behind with around 23% and MSN 3rd.

comScore Core Search Report* April 2008 vs. March 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
	Mar-08	Apr-08	Point Change Apr-08 vs. Mar-08
Total Core Search	100.0%	100.0%	0.0
Google Sites	59.8%	61.6%	1.8
Yahoo! Sites	21.3%	20.4%	-0.9
Microsoft Sites	9.4%	9.1%	-0.3
AOL LLC	4.8%	4.6%	-0.2
Ask Network	4.7%	4.3%	-0.4

Labels: pay per click

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

I cant find a better tool than Google analytics conversation tracking tracking visitors on their navigation to a website. We use conversion tracking for all the dynamic websites we optimize and it works great. Especially installing the code on correct pages like the checkout page or the cart page etc will show where you loose the users where they get stuck, what are the problems they are facing etc.
For example one particular client gets 1000s of visitors per but his conversation was very low he contacted us to find out the problem. Initially everything looked pretty fine and it was very difficult for us to find out the problem. Later we used Google analytics conversion tracking code on important pages like the shipping page, cart page, checkout page etc. After 2 or 3 days of monitoring we were able to identify that the users get stuck on the checkout page since for some browsers the checkout button javascript throws an error and redirects to the cart page again. Even after multiple clicks the potential customers were unable to go beyond the page on certain older version of IE and Mozilla browsers. Since our client and we use IE 7.0 we didnt find any problem but the conversion code showed us the problem since users were unable to go beyond the checkout page.

Immediately we checked with older version of the browsers identified the problem and were able to fix it. So I recommend when you have a dynamic site make sure you use conversion tracking its available in adwords too and also helps track Adwords conversions.

Labels: Adwords, google analytics