Click fraud is relatively under-control on Google AdWords, but it seems at Facebook it’s rife! Facebook need to get this under-control soon as click-fraud creates very negative PR for their advertising products.
I can testify that when trying to sell PPC campaigns to potential clients, the one thing they have all heard of is click fraud. At Sky Rocket Inc. we manage this by keeping a very close eye on the conversion rate for our clients.
More at Techrunch: Facebook Click Fraud 101.
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This new Event Tracking function now available in Google Analytics is pretty cool. It allows you track off-site clicks from your website. So you can get more insight into where your users are going when they leave your site.
Now, it would be really cool if there was a WordPress plugin out there that would automatically add the necessary Javascript to track every outbound click on your site.
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In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google said it had 1 million advertisers as of 2007. If history is any guide, we can expect the number to be much higher now. The number of advertisers on Google has grown at a steady clip, from 89,000 in 2003, to 201,000 in 2004, 360,000 in 2005 and 600,000 in 2006. (Source: NYT)
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Paid traffic
Paid traffic is online traffic that is bought, commonly referred to as PPC (Pay-Per-Click), CPC (Cost-Per-Click), CPM (Cost-Per-1,000-Impressions) & CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition).
Benefits:
- Immediate results
- Unlimited keywords
- Keywords are flexible
- Daily budget can be easily controlled
- Paid traffic generally converts much higher than Organic
- More control over ad copy
- More control of ad placement
- Only small design and code changes required on the site
Disadvantages:
- The costs can increase as competition increases
- Certain verticals such as Real Estate and Travel can be very competitive
Organic traffic
Organic traffic can come from people typing-in your URL to a browser, finding you in organic search listings on sites like Google or seeing your link on 3rd-party sites. As you can’t directly buy organic traffic, there are ways to make your site more likely to receive it; this process is loosely referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Benefits:
- It’s Free!
- If you get to the top of the organic search results on Google for a popular keyword you can get incredible volumes of traffic
Disadvantages:
- Not instant, can be a time-consuming process sometimes requiring a major website re-design
- Ranking can not be estimated precisely
- Expensive to implement
- Ranking is subject to change without warning
- SEO is Voodoo; a mysterious and somewhat underground practice. This is because certain SEO practices are deliberate attempts to fool search engines
- Search engines (Google) frown on certain SEO practices because they can effect the validity of their organic listings
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