It is roughly 3:00am, my stats program updated for the day about an hr ago, and I am already about 8x as profitable today as I was yesterday. That is kind of weird eh?
The only 2 variables in the advertising that I was doing was 1- day of the week, and 2- opting in to Googles Search Partner network of SHITE.
I do not think #1 was the issue, since we usually do pretty well on Sunday, so I am going to go with #2 being the culprit for yesterdays narrow margins.
To start the morning off we decided to try the Google search network to see if we could increase traffic and sales to one of our sites. We usually spend about $30 an hr, and today spent nearly 4 times that per hr. Our ROAS (return on ad spend) is usually around 75% and today we were running at a sweet 3.2%. I would have been better off putting my money in a fucking ING saving account to get that rate. To give you a better idea of how much we got p4wn3d by google, we spend $1525 to make $49.
The biggest source of new traffic was an amazing “high quality” partner searchportal.information.com. These assholes have more sophisticated robotic clicking than your run of the mill rip off companies. They were actually passing the user agents of numerous cell phones, which is a new fun trick, since we are not opted into the mobile market.
So I give props to both google and searchportal.information.com ganging up and giving me some sweet double anal action.
Tomorrow I get to waste 2 hrs requesting a refund for the shitty traffic you sent. The worst part about this is that the only true source of decent traffic at the moment are the following companies/settings:
Google – google network only
Yahoo – none/some with hard work and numerous complaints.
MSN – does not let me buy adult traffic, low volume for non adult sectors. PURE traffic and highly recommended.
ASK – a joke
So in the sectors I work in my only real choice is Google, and with that only the Google/google partner sites provide conversions for me.
I guess the ‘good news’ is that we are not the only ones dealing with the click fraud. Here is another guy over at SEO Chat.
What sites do you get the most fraudulant traffic from?
