Impression Spam Worries Google Advertisers
clickz.com
Rob McGann writes:
" Google is on the lookout for 'impression spam' but denies it poses a big threat to paid search advertisers. Advertisers and SEM firms beg to differ...
For Lisa Wehr, president of SEM firm Oneupweb, incidents of impression spam like the one Leino experienced call into question the logic of Google's CTR-based ad-ranking system.
'It's further evidence that if there is a chink in the armor, it will be exploited,' Wehr said. 'This is where Google needs to review what they're doing. Without the CTR algorithm, impression spam would go away.'
But Kamangar defended the value created by its CTR-based ad ranking system for both search engine users and advertisers. 'Our ad ranking system ensures that the most relevant ads will be seen by the users of our search engine,' he said. 'It's good for advertisers because it prevents advertisers from dominating a narrow field simply by paying a higher cost per click.'
Gauging the prevalence of impression spam is another thorny problem, said Gordon Brott, VP of marketing for WhosClickingWho, a business that identifies and stops click fraud.
'As far as we can tell, impression spam is not nearly as widespread as click fraud,' Brott said. 'But it's probably safe to say that the problem is going to get bigger.'
Google, however, doesn't expect incidents of impression spam to escalate, Google's Kamangar said.
'We have an automated system in place that detects when unusual amounts of impressions are occurring without click-throughs,' Kamangar said. 'And we have a team of analysts in place to research cases that are reported to us. It's a mechanism that grows more sophisticated over time and one that is working. So we do not expect an increase in the number of incidents in the future.' ""
Pay-Per-Call: for small-to-medium sized businesses
Pay-Per-Call: A New Avenue for Search Marketers Heather Lloyd-Martin writes:
"Local search in the U.S. is hot, but nearly 14 million companies—most of them small-to-medium sized businesses— are missing the local search marketing revolution because they don't have a website...
Yet another 4 million businesses have "brochureware" sites that aren't served by the cost-per-click model, according to Chief Marketing Officer of pay-per-call service provider Ingenio."
How it works: "When a prospect clicks on a pay-per-call ad, they are sent to a profile page about the business.
"The landing page provides a simple 'soundbyte' to try to engage the customer and get the call," says Ballister.
Merchants are charged on a CPA basis when someone calls the toll-free number—not when someone clicks-through from the ad. Call tracking information and call pattern statistics are available to the merchant so they can measure results.
Pay-per-call results are distributed across local search providers, Internet Yellow Pages and vertical directories, according to Barach. AOL is using Ingenio platform for AOL Search and AOL Yellow Pages, as is go2.com. FindWhat is also an Ingenio partner, with their pay-per-call results distributed across partners such as Snap.com and BizJournals.com."
Article concludes: "pay-per-call does a very specific niche for businesses without a web site, or for businesses that don't have the time, capital or knowledge base for a fully-optimized campaign. These merchants are still able to leverage a web "presence" of sorts (the pay-per-call ad) gaining highly qualified conversions."
Pay Per Call -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum thread about pay per call
WEB ANALYTICS ASSOCIATION Launch
MediaPost
"WEB ANALYTICS ASSOCIATION (WAA), A new trade association representing companies that conduct research about or process Web-related data, officially launched today. Founding members include: Coremetrics, IBM, Nedstat, Omniture, Visual Sciences, WebSideStory and WebTrends."
Click Fraud Looms As Search-Engiine Marketing Threat
Forbes.com & Associated Press
"Estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is going on in the $3.8 billion search engine advertising market...
In November, Google filed a lawsuit that revealed the search engine can't even trust some of its own advertising partners.
Houston-based Auction Experts International never responded to claims it collected at least $50,000 in illegitimate commissions by clicking on the ad links that Google delivered to its Web pages. But the site shut down and Google won a default judgment against one of its principals. ...
Once widely ridiculed, the idea (Adwords) has turned into a fast-spreading craze as more merchants realized substantially higher returns on search engine ads than on more traditional marketing campaigns conducted through the Yellow Pages, direct mail and newspapers."
