expertSEM

If there’s one thing that scares PPC marketers, it’s click fraud. While I maintain that the incidence is rarer than it’s made out to be by alarmists, it’s quite obvious that there are fraudulent sites trying to take advertiser’s money illegitimately. I was tipped off to this one by a friend who happened to see it within many of his PPC content targeting networks as a high traffic, no return site.

The first thing I notice about El Khalifa.net is the obscene number of Google AdSense ads, placed rather prominently, in close proximity to onsite buttons and in a similar color choice as the rest of the site. One concludes that they are not actually trying to provide a TV service, but rather a site where you frequently click on ads by accident. I actually tried to get a couple of the TV stations the site claims to stream, and I gave up after four in a row were broken. Another conclusion is that the scheme is to get people here either organically, or by buying ads elsewhere, and when the user gets frustrated because none of the channels work, they click on the much higher cost Google ads which offer a wide selection of foreign television channels. This is the best scenario, since the user might still be interested in TV.

But there is also the possibility that a network of individuals is actively clicking and pumping the numbers up to increase site revenue and advertiser cost. Given what we already know about the site, I would not be shocked if this turned out to be the case.

So who is at fault for getting into this mess? The site is obviously duplicitous, but we have come to expect that people will try to game anything that can be gamed (this is why my bike is locked up outside my office, it’s a nice area but…). Google certainly engages with this site at some level in allowing it to place Google’s advertisements, so I would say Google has failed to fulfill the advertisers trust by not booting these guys from the network. But again, their motive is to make money, and while I sincerely believe what they say about “Don’t be Evil,” they have been a little sloppy and slow with their distribution standards. This brings us to the advertisers. It’s their money and they are trusting two parties—Google and El Khalifa—to help spend it wisely… BAD DECISION!

A little bit of scrutiny here would go a long way. Now that Google is offering content match reports by site, wise search marketers will use these reports, as my friend did, to find the garbage and get rid of it. If you haven’t done this, you risk having hundreds of El Khalifas slowly erode your ad budget with no money making potential.