rbacal - 5:29 pm on Jan 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

no ad appeared but the clicks came rolling in and our money kept rolling out.

At least you aren't paying per click!

You're hitting one of the problems with advertising with site targeting, here, but it has more to do with being confident that your ads are showing in places that are desireable on any give site.

Re: length of stay, we found that site targeting didn't work for us, and length of stay was short, and ROI was..well also zero. For us it was a bit different, in that we didn't suspect any kind of fraud, but the end result was the same. I figure we could have made it work if we wanted to spend 10 hours a day just on site targeting.

Google, when the PPC bubble bursts, I will make sure I get a PUT trade on your stocks and laugh all the way to the bank as I make money while your stocks plummit from the lofty place you enjoy right now and that day will come.

This is the kind of comment that both makes me laugh, and tends to discourage offering any advice or techniques to help you try to avoid the problem.

I laugh because these exact comments are made periodically. The last major set was when google introduced QS. One Webmaster world guy proudly predicted a share price of 300 by Jan. 2007, and said he was going to clean up stock wise. Needless to say, he probably got completely hosed, and he hasn't posted since his diatribes.

There ARE ways to protect yourself when using site targeted ads, but it doesn't sound like you are that interested, so I'll leave you to your plan to short the stock.

Good luck. And let's hope that google comes up with ways to make site targeting easier and more effective.