Advertisers pay for clicks, and publishers make commission on each click that their traffic source provides. Yet the very model of pay-per-click advertising opens itself to fraudulent activity, putting advertisers at risk of paying commissions to publishers with poor-quality and artificial traffic.
As a result of click fraud, advertisers suffer decreased return on investment, and subsequently the entire industry is jeopardized. Advertisers may drop their bids or pull out of PPC-marketing programs altogether. Legitimate publishers are left with reduced commissions. And the result is that both sides of PPC networks languish. The entire industry is threatened.
Detecting and preventing click fraud is the only solution to this pervasive and dynamic force that has tainted the PPC-advertising industry to the detriment of advertisers, legitimate publishers and PPC search engines. This task rests in the hands of PPC engines themselves.
And while no one organization will ever be able to say they have completely eliminated click fraud from their networks, recently there have been considerable strides taken to combat click fraud, with many second and third-tier PPC search engines dropping significant portions of their syndication networks because of some blatant fraudulent activity.
PPC engines need to have the capacity to understand the value of their traffic and be able to distinguish high-quality traffic from poor-quality sources. The development of proprietary tools to analyze traffic data for advertisers is the best way to deliver solid ROI consistently. Nothing speaks louder than hard data that show conversions with traffic sources (a real profit based on what an advertiser spends) and the revenue this spend generates. As an example, GenieKnows.com employs a traffic-analysis team and the proprietary technology of the Genie Shield product to deliver conversion tracking, which eliminates automated clicking detects and removes paid-to-click traffic. It also analyzes click patterns based on user activity and micro-manages traffic sources on a per-URL or per-IP basis.
With proactive measures in place, PPC engines are able to strengthen relationships with advertisers, optimizing their campaigns to ensure that their ROI continues to grow. Naturally, if an advertiser is making a profit on their PPC campaigns, they will certainly want to reinvest.
There is a wealth of potential waiting to be realized in online advertising and within PPC advertising specifically. While billions of dollars are currently spent annually, billions more are still waiting to be invested, provided that advertisers’ spends are met with profitable conversions.
