expertSEM

Fair Isaac recently suggested that 10-15% of online advertising is pathological. Personal experience tells me this is wildly off.

Let’s first distinguish categories of online marketing, of course we have PPC, and then we have Contextual Marketing.

In PPC, if you or your agency maintains the proper control of contextual PPC programs, there is only one reason someone would click on your adds repeatedly… To drive up the cost of your marketing. This type of activity is either minimal at best, or is easily detected, and doesn’t approach 10 or 15% on average, maybe in the most competitive vertical, but not across the board.

If you aren’t careful with your contextual PPC, and just allow Google or Yahoo or whoever to place your ads wherever the computer thinks is relevant, then you open yourself up to site owners who want to pump up their own revenue by clicking on your ads, or having someone else do it. This can be bad, but this rarely accounts for very much of your ad budget, and the sheer volume of adspace is unlikely to foster a few advertisers really boosting their revenue at your expense without detection by you or the engines.

Moving on to other forms of contextual, banners and pop under ads, the same is true, only people trying to boost their revenue on a site they control have incentive to click on your ads. Close monitoring of IPs and clicks by source can help you determine if this is happening, that is if the engines don’t catch it and stop it first.

Having personally investigated dozens of click fraud allegations by clients, and having found almost no merit to any of them, I am skeptical. Of the few cases in which there was merit, the amounts at stake were at most 5% of any month’s adbudget, not even near the 10 – 15% alleged by Fair Isaac.

I’m calling them out… No Way guys.