For those
like me that must have too much time on their hands because
they end up reading an excessive amount of industry
articles, you might have noticed something. Some of these
recent industry articles actually talk about clicks, cost
per clicks. Everybody does CPC, so what’s the big deal. They
might embrace CPC now, but that hardly described the
landscape several years back.
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I love to reminisce. It’s
fun, and provides a constant source of material. In this
case, I think back to my days in the cost per click
business, back at the turn of the century. As discussed in
the Digital Thoughts, being an ad network back then was
tough enough; being an ad network that focused on cost per
click was equivalent to suicide. Unlike multiplication where
two negatives equally a positive, such did not occur in the
CPC ad network space. The only people that seemed to want
clicks were the free lotto’s of the world and sites that had
money to care about where they placed in the ratings.
Organic growth, nonsense – we’ll just have people visit us
because they want to win money from someone else’s site.
What changed? Search for
one thing, in particular paid search. Overture, formerly
GoTo.com, while around since the late 1990’s, didn’t start
to become mainstream until the bubble started to pop. They
helped usher in a new error of accountability. For the most
part though, CPC’s became the sole domain of the paid search
space. CPM still reined supreme when it came to
measurability of other types of ads. It’s during this time
that CPA started to go from “You can’t say that” to “We want
that.” In fact, CPA has come so far that today you have
agencies placing buys on CPA. Who would have thought?
Today, clicks go from being
only on search pages, to a now common element on web pages.
Their proliferation and mainstream adaptation has led to the
several recent articles that talk about click fraud. Like
clicks themselves, it’s nothing new. Perhaps, the mention of
click fraud being an issue in Google’s filings got people
thinking about the issue again. Anyone who has advertised
during the past five years, though, knows about and most likely
has experienced fraud. The pioneers of click fraud and
those most accustomed to it must be the adult industry. Some
of the most clever minds, especially when it comes to fraud,
come from those with adult advertising experience. That is
why statements such as these regarding click fraud, that it
“is emerging as an important concern for search engine
marketers” seem out of time and place.
Given the size of the
current CPC market, and the return of the click, the topic
still deserves mention and understanding. I admit, I’ve
clicked on a $20 per click ad just because I could. Sorry
Party Poker. According to one recent article, “This year,
the amount of exposure click fraud has received has
increased dramatically as a result of increased advertiser
savvy, increased overall CPC advertising costs, and
increased scrutiny into the CPC pricing model as a revenue
stream.” Google does earn 90%+ of its revenue from clicks,
so thinking that the Google IPO played a role makes perfect
sense. If click fraud comprised 0.01% of all clicks then
we’re talking about $810,000 on a yearly basis for Google.
If it’s 0.05%, that comes to just north of four million
dollars. When looking at the total clicks, that comes out to
about one fraudulent click every two seconds. Given all the
searches occurring, that sounds more than reasonable.
Engines and others have had
years to work on it, and the risk of it impacting one
advertiser heavily is very unlikely. If anything, I feel
safer now advertising than I would have years ago. Those
that click fraud hurts the most in my opinion are those with
very small budgets, those for whom each click makes or
breaks the business. Unfortunately, fraud will always exist,
and the increasing popularity and growth of click business
shouldn't heighten the concerns. Awareness of fraud is
important, but there are other much more important things
about which to worry. I have confidence that the engines
maintain constant vigilance as the integrity of their
business depends on it. More than anything, the recent
concerns about click fraud simply signify that
reemergence of the click. Then again, all of this is easy to
say when it’s not my money with which we’re dealing.
