the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

Let’s get ready to rumble! Ladies and gentleman, I honestly can say I thought I’d never see the day this would happen. What on earth would possess Google to allow CPA advertising campaigns? They have ZERO real competition with Adwords and Adsense. They dominate the marketplace. Why would you allow your inventory to be devalued? What are they thinking?

Not to mention the possible fraud. I would like to hear how they are going to guard against that. Maybe I’m missing something here, but if you thought CLICK FRAUD was big, wait until you get ahold of CPA fraud. I come from a CPA background (email and lead gen) and let me tell you, it is one nasty business, full of absolute schiesters.

For a more detailed breakdown of this initial revelation, seekingalpa originally broke the news.

SEOBook also raises an interesting point. He surmises that by gathering data all the way through to the conversion, a la CPA and conversion tracking, they will actually be getting a more complete set of data, and therefore will improve the quality of the search results.

“AdSense made it profitable to create garbage, but at the end of the day it just leads to a web full of garbage. How does Google fix the problem they created?”

That’s what I’d like to know.

This morning as I fired up my email account I saw that 90% of my inbox was devoted to the recent AdWords clickfraud case. Oh Joy! Because I have so many different Adwords accounts I had about 200 emails this morning from clicksettlement@xmr3.com. The email couldn’t have looked spammier. This company apparently doesn’t know how set DNS correctly so all of their emails were labeled as sp@m. Once I did open it up this is how it read:

“This court-ordered notice may affect your legal rights. Please read it carefully. If you purchased online advertising from Google between January 1, 2002 and the present, you are a class member in a class-action lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas. This notice is to inform you of the Court’s certification of a class; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement. Please read the attached notice.”

You can get more information at: www.clicksettlement.com.

I was thrilled that I may have the opportunity to visit Miller County, Arkansas. Maybe I’ll go there after my WalMart headquarters tour. What a vacation that could be.

Anyhow, it turns out it wasn’t spam, as everyone thought.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=87479

And if you want the official word from Adwords legal:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the trouble for a penny on the dollar. And I also think that the companies who brought suit are fishing morons. The real deal on clickfraud? In reality it’s very minimal. I have personally managed hundreds and hundreds of PPC campaigns and have come across clickfraud a handful of times. When I have seen this happen, it was so hilariously obvious I simply ran a report, sent it to my rep at the engine, and we worked together to verify it. Then they simply refunded my client. Case closed. My experience has led me to believe that this is not a prevalant problem. It does exist, but on a much smaller scale than the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. Fear makes good copy folks, just ask Fox News.