PPC Fraud

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I am surprised that PPC Fraud does not get more attention. Have we all resigned ourselves to accepting it as the cost of doing business? Yet, each day it eats away our profits and advertising budget taking us off line and making our ads unavailable to legitimate buyers!

Google and Yahoo have no real incentive to correct this problem. It generates massive amounts of revenue for their companies every day!

Notice the Search Engines are offering the New Local Search, which has the ability to filter traffic that pertains only to a small business area. However, they do not offer the ability to limit foreign traffic from your site! Why is that? Because they are aware that many of the Fraudulent PPC come form other countries and do not want to lose that revenue!

Any site whose only purpose is to generate revenue from advertising should be suspicious!

Take notice of Shopping Directory Sites whose only content is PPC Ads appearing in your website statistics. Many have the same IP Address but use several different Domain Names through Masking techniques to avoid detection! Most of these sites cannot be found in a search on any Engine. So where does this traffic come from? Do the use a Pay Per Read Network? Do they have a spy bot network?

Why would the Search Engines sign up such sites to carry our ads anyway? Again, they are counting on our ignorance and will accept the few claims made by advertisers who do the research and make the claim. This is peanuts compared to the revenue these sites generate for the Search Engines!

I think the search engines should make the following changes:

1. Ability to Opt Out of Advertising on Foreign Domains.

2. Ability to Opt Out of Sites whose only Content is PPC Advertising.

3. Ability to Filter PPC visitors outside your area of business.

It is my belief that these changes would go a long way in fighting PPC Fraud. They are changes that the Search Engines have the ability to make but WILL NOT without pressure from the Advertisers.

This problem will only get bigger unless we act together.

These are my thoughts - What are yours?

[edited by: seth_wilde at 6:06 pm (utc) on Jan. 30, 2006]
[edit reason] no calls to action [/edit]