Just last week, I served as a panelist on a Search Marketing Now webcast titled: “Ad Networks Best Practices: Keeping Your Advertisers Happy.” Dana Todd, the CMO of Newsforce.com and President Emeritus of SEMPO, joined me and we covered the topic of quality in ad networks. In the webcast, Dana talked about best practices for ad networks and how they can manage traffic quality and value for their customers. Transparency between search engines, ad networks and advertisers was discussed as a key component to helping the industry solve the quality issue. You can listen to the webcast here.

On a related note, earlier last week InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia published a poignant article that stands as another example of why we need more transparency in the industry. He discusses Google’s apparent silence on why some of Paul’s web sites were recently kicked out of the AdSense publisher network. Like many others in the industry, Paul is in the dark on his standing with Google.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/venezia/archives/017511.html

Reproduced with the permission of Neil Matthews.
Originally posted at http://www.clickqualityconsultant.com/index.php/2008/06/11/case-study-sometimes-it-aint-click-fraud/

I was recently working with a client based in the US who had seen a massive increase in click through and no corresponding increase in conversion. He contacted me with a view to investigate possible click fraud.

As a starting point I obtained an invalid click fraud report (see below). From this we can see an incredibly suspicious increase in clicks and cost per click.

I asked for a copy of their web server logs to run through my analysis tool to see what was causing this problem.

The company works in the US mortgage space, a notoriously competitive and expensive place to advertise. An arena ripe for competitor click fraud attacks.

The client’s technical team went off to retrieve the logs for the particular weekend when the problem occurred, only to come back and report that the logs were not available. They could not be retrieved from the backups, they had gone missing! The month before and after were available but nothing for the suspicious weekend.

Light bulbs lit up in my mind, but I did not want to alarm my client without any foundation. I thought this was an inside job.

Sure enough my client came back to me, a disgruntled employee had increased the cost per click and expanded the campaign widely . They also deleted the web server log files for the period in an effort to cover their tracks. The net result was a click bill for perfectly valid clicks to the tune of tens of
thousands of dollars. Needless to say the employee was shown the door very quickly.

The moral of the story, it’s not always click fraud, and only very trusted employees should be given the keys to your pay per click budget. The damage to the bottom line can be huge if your Adwords admin goes rogue.

These clicks were perfectly valid, and internal grudges is not an acceptable reason for a refund from Google.

Recently, many advertisers received an “exciting announcement” in their Adwords accounts. Google announced that its new Automatic Matching feature is rolling out in a new expanded beta format. Automatic Matching has been enabled for some advertiser’s accounts since the end of February. The expanded beta now opts more advertisers in to this feature.

Automatic Matching is an algorithm-based broad match feature designed to serve ads on keywords not already in an advertiser’s keyword list. It kicks in when an advertiser isn’t reaching their daily ad budget. For example, if you have a daily ad budget of $10,000, and you’ve only used $8,000, Google will automatically match queries to your ads to extract the additional $2,000 in your budget. Google is constantly thinking of innovative new ways to monetize every search query. Their Automatic Matching feature allows Google to capitalize on queries which otherwise might not be associated with ads. Think of Automatic Matching as broad match on autopilot.

So what does this mean for advertisers? Daily ad budgets will be reached far more often, as any change left over in your purse will be extracted by Google. We also know that poorly-managed broad match keywords can devastate a campaign. Since Automatic Matching is a type of broad match, I think it’s going to be very difficult for advertisers to manage these campaigns. I expect to see lower click-thru rates and higher costs-per-click. Google recommends that advertisers use the Search Query Report in Adwords to see which keywords are triggering Automatic Matching. The only problem with this is that the Search Query Report hides the actual keywords under a listing of “XX Other Unique Queries”.

In the end, it sounds like Automatic Matching will most benefit small- to medium-sized advertisers who lack dedicated SEM resources. However, advertisers who actively manage their paid search campaigns may want to opt out of this feature.

There’s certainly a cost associated with the convenience of letting a search engine manage your paid search campaigns.

Advertiser brands are being used against them.

This week’s Wall St. Journal had an excellent article about “Piggybacking”. (No they are not referring to throwing a kid on your back and jumping around the yard!) This piggybacking is a form of brand infringement that is haunting thousands of advertisers. It is the practice of buying a trademarked brand and profiting from it. Google is guilty of facilitating this practice.

The Journal gave several exceptional examples of how brands including American Airlines and InterContinental are trying to fight back. One example was the term, “Holiday Inn Orlando” which, when clicked, led consumers to http://www.LowFares.com. This site is not authorized to use the Holiday Inn brand name. To make matters worse, the site had Holiday Inn ads on the site. Each time these ads were clicked Holiday Inn ends up paying both Google AND LowFares.com for the illicit click.

Google, in a typical “do no evil” response, refers to their trademark policy. Unfortunately, their policy is not carried out on their site. This problem is similar to the geo-targeting issue. When an advertiser tells Google they want their ads targeted to the US, they expect that this will occur. We find that as much as 10% of the US targeted ads appear outside the US.

This brand hijacking is yet another aspect to the traffic quality management issue that we help customers deal with. A high level of diligence is required to ensure advertiser brands are protected. Time and time again Click Forensics finds violations for our clients and even our own brand. These problems are generally fixed when we alert the search engine. But without constant monitoring, the damage is done.

Who profits from this? GOOG.