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Just thought I'll let you know a bit of my recent experience with PPC. As the subject indicates, it's one of the smaller players, brainfox.com , in case anyone had/has any intentions of using it. It's your money - do it on your own risk!
OK - so I put in my $25, got a $25 bonus and chose my keywords. I bid low (you can bid as low as 0.001) and I would get 5-7 visits / week. It was not making a dent in my pocket and it wasn't making any difference to the web site. In fact, the traffic was so low that I never actually foud the time to closely inspect my log files and check the authenticity of those clicks.
Anyway - I now receive an email that says that my funds are repleted. Guess what? In the last 4 days I received 300 clicks! Wow!
Swinging into action, I go check the log files. It doesn't take a close inspection to reveal that the clicks WERE there - but no way they were made by humans!
For exmaple, one of my keywords was bidded so low that it was ranking #135. And it was clicked! What user in his right mind would browse through 13 pages and just fall inlove with that listing? OK - ASSUME that there is such a user, how could he then not even browse ONE page from the site? In fact, "he/she" didn't even load the graphics of the Home Page!
In fact, NONE of the other 'clicks' ever bothered to load an additional page - ever!
To borrow the terminology of another post here - the bounce rate was a perfect 100%!
Now to a real nice touche. They say you can dispute a click. Great. I went through the trouble of marking ALL the clicks as disputable, and clicked on the appropriate link. The result? Here it is:
Upgrade Notice
Online dispute resolution is only available to Premier and Premier Plus accounts. If you wish to enable this function, please click here to upgrade your account to the Premier Plus business account. Otherwise, if you wish to dispute a particular click, please click on the support links above.
I wrote an email to complain. I could have addressed it to /dev/null and get the same results: Not a word back in more than two weeks.
I guess some of you may think that it serves me right for using a second/third tier PPC engine. Perhaps. I guess that if I was reading more posts in this form I would have been waned of the idea very quickly.
Cheers!
MC
I had a piece of spyware on my PC last week and on every serp there was a brainfox ad right at the top followed by a few other non-relevant links.
Interestingly enough, adaware and spybot s&d were both unable to detect it and these two are my first lines of defence.
The Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C).IFCC's mission is to address fraud committed over the Internet. For victims of Internet fraud, IFCC provides a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of a suspected criminal or civil violation.
Watch out scumware sleazebags, internet punks, and two-bit PPC hustlers: the FBI might be coming down on you like Kojak and Barretta to bust your butts from here to kingdom come.
Thanks for that link! As you said, it was ONLY $25, quite reasonable for a valuable lesson :)
For me, the most important ever post I have seen on this board was from peoplespaces here: [webmasterworld.com...]
I am still at loss how people can afford to BUY traffic while losing so much to fraud. I know this question was raised, debated and discussed to death so I am not trying to reopen it here. I would say, though, that my experience with PPC, plus all the information about the staggering number of fraudulant clicks, leads me to believe that it is just a question of time before the much heralded 'PPC search model' will collapse.
And as you know, one 'internet year' equals 7 'normal years' - so we wouldn't wait long to find out :)
MC
I checked my own webstat and found there's only a few clicks from ppc search engines (I guess they are Brainfox partners) :(
I remember going over a monthly log and none of the visitors that came to the tracking url mydomain.com/?brainfox ever visited another page in my site.
maybe i'm just lucky but I have been using Brainfox for the past couple of weeks with excellent results. The ROI for leads and traffic level has been similar to my adwords campaign.
Not sure what I'm doing different than those who are experiencing poor results.
I got ~99% of referals from such URLs:
oas-central.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_sx.ads/www.ap.com/webhost/1924902@x32
...
...
oas-central.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_sx.ads/www.ap.com/brainfoxisp/19283749302@x11
I think that 100% of clicks = fraud. Visitors closing browser right after first page.
The suddend surge in traffic that 'eliminated' all my deposit came from cafefind.com . If you actually visit the place - it seems like yet another search place. It doesn't take a very deep probe to get the following from the whois database:
Domain Name: CAFEFIND.COM
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http: // www.enom.com
Name Server: NS1.BRAINFOX.COM
Name Server: NS2.BRAINFOX.COM
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 14-jun-2003
Creation Date: 04-dec-2002
Expiration Date: 04-dec-2003
Neat, no? It's not even an affiliate - it's the same place with another name! (Well, at least under 'the same management'...)
Just in case you too have many visitors from them :)
MC
p.s. I had an account with brainfox last year and received clicks from real searches.
Other small PPCs offer some outstanding fraud protection, and are looking to establish themselves in the long term, not mount a slash and burn type of business.
Care to name them?
We use a Kanoodle feed, and they require a serious amount of fraud detection and prevention and/or will heavily screen the clicks that they will pay for.
I was very impressed with their efforts.
For example, with even bothering to inform their advertisers, they started placing search results in a big ugly frame. Worst still that frame features links to other search listings at Kanoodle which people can visit with one click. So it has been made VERY easy for people to click through to another result on Kanoodle - right from YOUR home page. Of course, it increases the revenue for Kanoodle significantly as people move rapidly from advertiser to advertiser.
Go to Kanoodle.com and do a search to see what I mean.
