Monday, December 06, 2004

Trademarks, now "Click Fraud"?

From FT.com Advertisers' budgets hit by growing cost of 'click fraud'

Companies advertising on the Google keyword search engine are becoming increasingly concerned about the practice of "click fraud", which is increasing their advertising budgets and rendering many campaigns useless.

This is all about to change.

Advertising on online search engines such as Google has become one of the fastest-growing parts of the advertising industry. But its still primitive.

Advertisers are attracted to search engine advertising because it brings them a targeted audience, and easy methods of counting the effectiveness of their adverts. It is also providing an advertising platform for a number of small businesses which would previously not have had an appropriate place to advertise on a small budget. However, advertisers are frustrated by an increasing number of instances in which the system is being abused.

It is possible, however, for the number of registered clicks to be artificially inflated. A rival company, for example, can programme a network of computers to automatically click on these links.

Two big variables, who sees my site, and what will it cost. Both variables are now flawed. How can website owners eliminate at least one of these variables?
So that begs the question, how much of the "click" in pay-per-click is real?

What if the revenue model changed and wasnt being valued on clicks?.. that would solve all of this. What if the advertiser valued who clicked more than how many clicks?

What if Googles ad revenue was generated by the website, versus clicks. If Google could get a "cut" of every website cost, they would then want true traffic to get to these sites. Advertisers and companies would be more apt to register and direct their ad dollar to Google knowing this.

Is there a way to make all domains unique? To distinquish a Google registered domain versus all the others? How can a company make their own domain unique?


Coming soon...

Google has advised the companies to increase their advertising spend to avoid burning through their budgets so quickly...theres a surprise.

Advertisers have to pay for this "fraud" until the search engines fix it.
It would be the same as Visa telling their client to pay for the unauthorized use of their card while Visa resolves the problem.

Advertising on a SE is like paying for a TV ad and not being told when it will air, on what channel and the cable company chnges the lineup.



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