Click Fraud: Can it happen to you?
Beware Advertisers: Click Fraud is For Real
Like most businesses, when I was introduced to Google’s Pay-per-Click advertisement program called Google Adwords, I was overjoyed. No more advertising in costly magazines and journals which hardly generate any leads. Here I only pay when someone is eagerly and actively looking for my product or service.
Too good to be true… only pay for leads that click on your ad. So my ad can show for thousands of impressions a day, but I only pay for the handful of people who click on it and visit my web site.
And it was good too, because my SEO business started getting leads that were hot - literally as soon as I started the ads. So I was happy… and I increased my daily budget on Google and increased my cost-per-click, so that my ad could rank higher up on the search result pages.
Clicks Galore…
And I naturally started getting more hits from this extra exposure. Getting 10-20 clicks and ever 40 clicks a day became the norm. My spending with Google also skyrocketed. As I became happier, I became complacent too… as long as I was getting more visitors to my site, I wasn’t complaining…
Until I got my latest invoice from Google. Boy, I was jolted right out of my seat. It seemed that Google had maxed out my daily budget times the 31 days in the month. I had got new business from Google, but I didn’t know I was getting this many visitors from my ad campaign.
A quick look at my Google AdWords campaign showed me a huge number of clicks over the past several days and weeks. The number wasn’t 20 or 30 clicks anymore. It was in hundreds of clicks a day. Funny, I hadn’t received so many quotation requests or emails from people joining our eMarketing Ideas Newsletter or commenting on our blog . Something funny was going on…
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Understanding Broad Match Ads in Google Adwords
Vinai, since broad match gives me maximum coverage by using all possible combinations of my keywords, why would anyone need a exact match ad? - Sangeeta Kapur, India.
Sangeeta, Thanks for raising a very important topic. There is a lot of confusion about the different match types, and most new Google Adword users arn’t aware of the 4 different types of ads that can be setup within Adwords. They merely start with the default option, which is the broad match.
Broad match is good for starters, when you don’t know what keywords your users are typing when searching for your products or services. This is because broad match ads will trigger for any partial match of your keywords.
Let’s say you offer web design , and you choose this broad term as your keyword. Now your ads will trigger whenever anyone searches for web design. But they will also trigger whenever anyone searches for web or design, in any order, as in spider web, graphic design, web marketing or book cover design. .
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How to Get More Traffic to your Website?
I have setup a website since last year, but I hardly get any traffic. What should I do to get people to visit my site? - Shawn Humphrey, Sydney, Australia
Great question Shawn. These days it is not difficult to setup a website. People can do it easily. What is more challenging is to generate traffic to your site. Since you didn’t post your website address, I can’t see what’s wrong with it, but here’s a few strategies you can use.
3 Great Ways to Generate Traffic to your website
1. Create a Site Map:
A site map is a complete index of all the pages on your website. Creating a Site map, and submitting it to search engines is a good way to ensure that all of your pages are indexed by the search engines. Once the search engines know more about all of your pages, they will come to "crawl" the pages, read its content, and keep it available for searchers to read.
Make sure all your pages are indexed by search engines. There are many third party site map tools that help you to create a site map for free. Even Google offers a site map creation utility , under its Webmaster tools.
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