Advertisers are Getting Hosed by PPC Ad Networks!
When you go to a car wash, no matter what wax and shine extras you decide to choose, all wash results should be same — a good car cleaning! Advertisers are getting hosed by PPC ad networks. Networks need to be vigilant about their own traffic, but are not. PPC ad networks are not taking responsibility and slipping on doing the obvious “wash” of keeping any bad traffic out. An advertiser should come to expect (and assume) that a good traffic cleansing is something that the PPC ad network does by default.
Why is it not happening?
1) Some of the smaller ad networks just aren’t able to police bad traffic. They simply don’t know how, which is the big answer for the small fries.
2) The big ad networks have the same policing problem, but, on the flipside, they’ve got to meet their revenue numbers, might have folks that report to them, and a whole host of shareholders breathing down their necks looking for those quarterly projections. Unfortunately, for the advertisers, it’s easy for the ad networks to inflate numbers and get revenue out of poor sources of traffic.
How to Get a Clean Sweep
There are solutions for ad networks to take responsibility. Starting off:
1) PPC ad networks need to follow-through with complaints from advertisers.
2) Certain sources of bad traffic need to be removed.
3) More resources need to be applied to identifying click fraud and put toward developing better communications strategies with their advertisers. PPC ad networks really need to offer advertisers improved conversion technology and analytics to allow them to weed out problematic traffic.
Well, yeah, even those cars that get detailed can never become 100 percent cleaned. However, while there will always be click fraud, the future should be a place where only a small margin of it will be coming through. The vast majority of traffic that the advertisers are paying for should be of quality. As prices on Yahoo! and Google become more and more inflated, there is going to be a bigger demand for tier 2 ad networks. There might be a small number of players, yet those networks will all focus on quality of traffic.
Don’t Ask for Credit Where Credit Isn’t Due
There are a lot of click fraud analytic tools and click fraud companies which allow advertisers to analyze the traffic quality of Google or other PPC ad networks to expose poor quality traffic results. An advertiser can also fill out forms that these click fraud companies have created so that it can submit them to Google in the hopes that the advertiser can get a credit from the ad network.
Is this what the industry is coming to? It’s the PPC ad networks fault because they are not doing their jobs and forcing advertisers to come up with ways to present data to these engines to say, “Hey when are these networks going to wake up and do something?” PPC ad networks should not wait for advertisers’ complaints or advertiser feedback before ridding their customers of poor quality, which is, unfortunately, where the industry is currently not going. There has to be a more proactive and responsible approach by the PPC ad networks.
It’s time for a good cleaning!!!
Reader Comments.
FYI, distribution fraud is the real fraud.
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