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I've written two articles so far on this topic. Both touch on the Paid-to-Read industry's contributions to the problem of click fraud – how some PTR programs are blatant about their fraudulent practices, and others are less than forthcoming about it. In this article, I will explain how click fraud in PTR actually drains the PPC advertiser's advertising budget and how those who perpetrate this fraud make their money.
Let's say, for example, that I recently launched a website where I sell candles. I choose to advertise my business in one of the most cost-effective ways – through pay-per-click advertising. With PPC, I know that once I fund my account, I am only going to be charged each time someone clicks through to my website from the PPC search engine I'm advertising with. I assume that the click-throughs I will receive will be from those who are truly interested in candles, since they would have had to search for candles to come across my link. For the sake of argument, we'll say that I have put in a bid amount of 10 cents on the keyword “candles”, meaning that each time someone clicks through on my link, 10 cents is deducted from the amount I originally funded my account with.
PPC search engines are often smaller engines. Therefore, they are not usually frequented nearly as much as Google is, for instance. In order for most of them to receive large levels of traffic, they feed their results to even more obscure search engines. Several tiers down are search engines that are most often seen in PTR programs, which have long since become known as “bottom feeders”. Anyone can spend a couple hundred dollars to purchase search engine scripts and slap together one of these bottom feeder engines. Any time someone makes a search through a bottom feeder engine, the results they see are fed to that engine from an upper-level PPC engine.
The only way these bottom feeder search engines can hope to receive any traffic to speak of is to offer an incentive to people to become affiliates and advertise their search portal page. This incentive ranges dramatically based on a percentage of the bid amount (usually above and beyond 75%) – the amount that the advertiser bid on a particular keyword that is deducted from their advertising budget each time someone clicks through to their website from the search engine.
Using my example above, if I have bid 10 cents on the keyword “candles” and receive a click-through from a bottom feeder engine whose results are fed from the PPC engine I originally advertised from, I lose that 10 cents and the bottom feeder affiliate receives at least 7.5 cents of my bid.
Now, this arrangement is not a problem, in and of itself. After all, if I am a website owner concerned with driving interested viewers to my products and services, it really shouldn't matter to me what happens to that bid amount once it leaves my account. All that matters is receiving those interested viewers.
The key here is “interested”, and lack of interest is the entire problem with incentivized and forced searches. In a program where the members are either bullied or coerced to make a valid search, many are no longer interested in what they are searching for and their interest shifts to how much they are getting paid to make that search in the first place.
Another thing to consider here is the sheer volume of searches that most members are asked or forced into making each and every day. I mentioned in my Proliferation of Click Fraud: Blatant Defiance article that most forced search PTR programs send anywhere from 30 to 150 searches to each of their members every single day. Add that to the fact that forced search programs tend to be more popular than honest PTRs because they pay more per click. This means that forced search programs often have several thousand members each.
So let's do some quick math, just to give you a rough idea of how much money click fraud can cost the average advertiser's budget:
Let's say that the program has 1,000 members that actively click and search on every e-mail ad they receive during the course of a day. Multiply that by 30 searches (which is about the lowest number of ads sent out daily by most forced search programs) and that gives you 30,000 searches made daily. If they all search on my “candles” keyword, which I have bid 10 cents per click-through on, that one day has cost me $3,000. If the bottom feeder affiliate makes 75% of my bid amount of 10 cents, they have earned $2,250.
Perhaps $3,000 does not seem like much for an advertising budget, but let's look at the long-term effect that click fraud will have. Multiply $3,000 (which is one day's ad cost) by 365 days in the year, and you have spent $1,095,000. The affiliate stands to make $821,250.
It's scary that this is only an illustration of one singular PTR program out of hundreds, if not thousands, of others that also send out searches and force members to search. It is only a simplistic example, but one that holds true in the PTR industry. If you must advertise with PPC search engines, my recommendation would be to bid low on your keywords and get confirmation from the engine you plan to advertise in on whether they feed lower-tiered engines and where their traffic comes from. Anything less would be like flushing your advertising budget down the toilet.
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