• Click fraud rates went down last quarter (16.0 percent) compared to the previous quarter (16.2 percent).

Other than that, that is about all the good news for PPC advertisers and click fraud.  Here is the bad news:

• Most click fraud happens on Search Engine content networks (Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, for example).  On those networks, the fraud rate was 27.1 percent last quarter.
• 27.6 percent of click fraud traffic came from botnets, which is up more than 2 percent from last quarter (25.2 percent).  Another reason for users to protect their computers from hackers.
• Russia (4.9 percent), France (4.8 percent) and the U.K. (3.5 percent) are the coutries most responsible for click fraud traffic outside the U.S.

The sad thing about this is that, according to Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics, a primary reason for the slight decline in click fraud from last quarter is because of the efforts of the ADVERTISERS, not necessarily the Ad networks.  According to Click Forensics, the advertisers have spent more time checking their clicks and filtering out the fraudulent ones before their campaigns were affected.  The Ad Networks have made better strides in doing that automatically, but it is still not enough.  In the end, it is still up to the people who pay to double-check their accounts, which is unfortunate that it has to be left up to them.

With the PPC click fraud rate being 16 percent industry wide, that loosely translates into $16.00 out of every $100 you spend is lining the pockets of some person who is not the least bit interested in your product or service.  If your monthly budget is $100, you are paying a lot per year for fraudulent clicks.  Pretty steep to me.

If you only advertise on Google and Yahoo, that number could climb to $27 out of $100, loosly figured.

This indicates that one should not just jump into Internet Advertising without examining all the angles.  It can certainly provide great benefits, but also presents risks that one should measure first.

It should also be noted about Click Forensics that their data are gathered from their own network called the Click Fraud Network.  That network is made up of more than 4,500 online advertisers and agencies, but it does not include everyone.  So, if you are weighing the pros and cons of PPC advertising, you should review data from multiple sources including the actual Ad Network you are considering joining.

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Currently, the Beta version is only released for use by a targeted group:

• Yahoo! Store
• Yahoo! Developers (Y!OS)
• Yahoo! Head Advertisers (Microsites)

If you do not fall into at least one of those categories, “No soup for you”.  You will have to be patient and wait your turn.

You can, however, visit the Yahoo! Web Analytics website and signup to receive updates and get a sneak peek at some screenshots of the dashboard.

Dennis Mortenson explains on his blog:

…this is not a free-for-all-come-and-get-it launch, but a carefully planned controlled access launch, which will keep all of our functionality in place and even enhance it. There is no dumbing down of the tool in any of the engagements above – and we will be working hard to add to the list of customers who can get access. So expect the above list to grow rapidly over the course of 2008.

Michael Stebbins also reported on this on his web analytics blog, which is a must read.

Until everything is released to the masses, we will just have to wait and keep using Google Analytics and ClickTracks.

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Last week Google announced it will sell off the Performics portion of DoubleClick:

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

Of course, looking back, it seemed obvious that Google would do that. It was the right thing to do and failure to do that would have shed a bad light on Google. Danny Sullivan was one who openly expressed the desire to see Google do that and is glad they did.

Couple the sale of Performics and the reported layoff of 300 of DoubleClick’s employees and that means about 500 people share the distinction of briefly being Google employees. That fact still looks nice on a résumé…

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And to think that Google had the nerve to penalize US just for selling a few text-links on our blog … wow.

Here is a quote from Performics’ web site that I thought summed it all up pretty well:

Together, DoubleClick Performics and DoubleClick offer clients an unparalleled range of marketing solutions and are uniquely positioned to compare effectiveness across marketing channels for valued clients.

I particularly liked the phrase “uniquely positioned“. THAT is somewhat understating it, I think. Imagine being able to pick up the phone and call Google to find out what to do to get a particular site ranking #1… Why would ANYONE hire any other SEM/SEO firm? After all, if you wanted your brand new site to shoot to the top of the SERPs, wouldn’t you STRONGLY consider the Search Engine Marketing company owned by the number one Search Engine? Of course you would. At the very least, the fact that Performics and Google are related has to carry a ton of clout, even if Google claims that they are not going to give special treatment to Performics’ clients.

Danny Sullivan posted about this today in a post that would have taken me about 5 months to complete – good job, Danny.

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Of the 10 billion searches tracked, here is how they broke down during the month:

• Google captured 5.9 billion
• Yahoo! accounted for 2.2 billion searches
• Microsoft dropped just below the 1 billion mark at 984 million
• Ask was used 463 million times
• and AOL/Time Warner sites were used for 453 million searches.

AOL/Time Warner had the largest jump during the month (0.3 points) and Yahoo! had the biggest drop of -0.4 points.

For all you visual people out there, we have a pretty, little Flash graphic in the right column, so check it out

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For example, you could apply for the currently open position of “Search Quality Evaluator” if you live in Mountain View or want to move there.

“We can’t tell how much this helps Google with its search results. But it is clear that some problems are still better handled by people.”
Saul Hansell
New York Times

Or, you could apply to become a Google Linguist and help analyze the content that Google indexes. Incidentally, the fact that Google is hiring linguists coupled with the fact that they are currently scanning and indexing thousands of college library books (and have been doing so for some time) should really drive home the importance of writing web site content for humans, not robots. That Google is doing this indicates that they are improving the ability of Googlebot to recognize normal human speech and language patterns. Translation: pages that are written for robots will probably soon be dropping in the SERPs. Write for humans.

You could even apply for one of the many temporary positions such as Google Quality Rater.

It is nice to see Google trying to supplement their Search algorithms with some actual human interaction. Too many times, it seems that quality web sites are penalized for some obscure, unclear violation while spammy, made-for-adsense sites flourish.

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“What does this mean for those hiring other companies and looking for great search engine placement? We will just have to wait and see.”
Scott Buresh

Scott’s article elaborates on the fact that when Google purchased DoubleClick earlier this year, as part of that package they also got the SEO company Performics, who was a wholly owned subsidiary of DoubleClick.

I had certainly heard of Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and the similar purchases made by MSN (they bought Aquantive) and Yahoo! (they bought Right Media and BlueLithium).

Google’s ownership of an SEO company has been discussed on other sites as well. And many of those discussions point out that it is a somewhat odd (some say unethical) partnership, which is the point that Scott was making in his article. It seems questionable to me on two fronts:

1. It seems that Google could be accused of playing favorites to Performics and that could give them a definite advantage over other SEO companies. After all, if you wanted to have the best chance of a successful SEO campaign, wouldn’t you hire the SEO company owned by the most popular Search Engine? Even if Google comes out and states that they are in no way helping Performics with any “insider” information, just the fact that Performics is owned by Google would seem to give them some serious clout in comparison to other SEO companies.
2. Everyone is interested in ranking on Google because it is the Internet’s most used Search Engine (check out the Flash graphic in the sidebar at the right to see their current market share). However, Google is interested in selling PPC advertising to companies who want to achieve high rankings. They want companies to setup Adwords accounts and then pay to be listed in “Sponsored Links” section of the SERPs. So when a company ranks well in the free organic results, Google does not get paid. Until now, it would appear.

Earlier this year, Scott wrote an article on Medium Blue’s web site which gave more perspective on the blurring line between Google’s PPC listings and the organic listings.

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Now before you decide to move your site above you competitor’s, you have to be signed in to your Google account to participate. That means you are only manipulating the search results as they are displayed to you personally.

I would imagine that Google is paying attention to the selections that participants make. Hopefully, if searchers come across some blatantly spammy pages, the individual searcher will hit the delete icon. If a particular site gets enough deletes, it will probably mean something to Google and might alert them to do a manual review on the site. After all, they want webmasters to rat out other web sites that are displaying paid links.

Shout out to Haochi from the Googlified Blog for giving the details on the Google search experiment.

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