PPC blog - Pay Per Click Blog

In a battle of the second tier PPC engines, it appears that Lycos has Joined forces with Ask.com to produce a brand new network of second/third tier traffic:

http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com/lycos/index.html

https://insite.lycos.com/

I have my complaints with both of these, and ASKs tools for opting out of their shitty partners are horrendous. Lycos actually had a decent to use tool set but an interface that was for shit. When I was able to opt in to only lycos.com I was very happy with the low volume high quality traffic I received. Ask on the other hand enjoyed whoring my ads out across their sweet network of sites geared toward the robotic audience.

I would stay far away from this network until further testing is done to see where the ads are displayed. Either that or set low limits, have reporting set up on your end and prepare to spend a few hrs on the phone demanding refunds and adjustments on your accounts until they quit sending you shit traffic.

My question is this, when you combine two things with not much value do you get something better or worse than what you started with?

This is my first tip on the site: DO NOT USE ASK.com FOR PPC, unless you are only selling clicks…

Background: I signed up with an Ask Jeeves Advertising account yesterday and experienced a massive amount of worthless traffic that was not even clicking my links once it reached my site. After finding out about this I wrote a nice little email to ASK.com explaining the situation. I am kind of upset that I forgot to tell Barry Diller to eat a dick in the email.

Here is the email:

Hello, I signed up with ASK last night (account # 490588) and managed to use almost half of my deposit (around 50 of my $100) in under a few hours. Also my daily budget of $10 was exceeded on both days.

In addition to that I am getting ONLY clickbot traffic from your network of sites, which I did not opt in to including these sources:

http://6161.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.unitedsearchnetwork.com
http://feed.genieknows.com/yz/search_html.jsp
http://suzako.com/other.php
http://6678-59069_2559710.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6679-59131_2596293.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59069_2577094.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59647_2597279.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59069_2559717.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.bestohyes.com/search/
http://6678-59844_2597280.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.findaccurate.com/pro.php
http://www.2005.com/search/
http://6453.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-58768_2579356.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-60689_2592612.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.searchfeed.com/rd/Clk.jsp
http://dpxml.verizon.net/_1_2DH7U4H0LYLJ3K__vzn.isp/search/web/n…
http://6678-59895_2604160.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6106-b2001.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.searchcreep.com/results.php
http://6678-59647_2597286.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59780_2576412.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6679-59131_2561197.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6679-61013_2614426.pa rtners.findology.com/2.php
http://6916-175.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6107-b2001.partners.findology.com/2.php

At this point you have 2 choices;

1. refund our money for this worthless traffic, opt us out of your “partners” and only show our ads on ASK.com

2. cancel our account, refund the remainder of the money in the account and face a chargeback on the previous charges.

I would also like to be assured that you will not be automatically rebilling my account when the budget is low.

Regards,
George Kepnick

This is one the best articles I have read about the subject of click fraud.

Business Week - The Dark Side of PPC

Finally someone digs into the numbers and gives examples of how a Paid To Read click ring works.

This is also a reason why MSFT does not have click fraud issues at the moment, however they are about to start whoring out their network with an AdSense type of program it sounds like. Don’t do it MSFT!

Work in progress was the theme of the MSN AdCenter pre SES meeting today. They seem to be taking notes on all the problems keep addressing on the various message boards and they plan to start rolling out feature upgrades.

The next big update to Microsoft AdCenter will be on August 5^th, 2006, referred to as the 8-5-6 update.

Here is what they are planning on adding:

• Support for Firefox 1.5 – One less thing for everyone to complain about.
• Cut & Paste - up to 200 Keywords, up from 100
• Filters by Timestamp – this is a fancy way of saying that they are copying the AdWords interface. It will allow you to change the time frame of the report details on the keyword/order/campaign pages. Right now it is showing “life to date” and it will allow you to change it to month to date, last month, etc.
• Reporting Update – They are working making the reporting more up to date, pull the info quicker, etc.
• Various Bug Fixes - all the stuff that people noted on the forums, including getting billed over yopur budget due to delays in their system
• Estimation tool - Improving the estimation tool to be more accurate.

Maybe not in this release, but probably in the next:

• Power Posting – like on Adwords it would allow users to paste in a keyword, url, bid price and parameter.
• Negative Keyword Enhancement – not 100% sure what they are doing on this, but they will be expanding the capabilities of the negative keywords.
• Waterfall Properties – this is the fancy name for adjusting something at a top level and having it apply to the things below it. I will call hieratical preferences…such things as geo targeting, day parting, demographic settings, hopefully negatives, could be applied at a campaign or account level and apply to everything below, rather than having to manually adjust the settings on every order in your account.

Other then that stuff they talked a bit about their contextual network, tools, analytics and some other items…nothing major other than these fixes. MSFT did show some testimonials from adveritsers and I plan to diagnose their business models and see if I can replicate the results for my self (c:

The tools seem to be pretty amazing over at AdCenter Labs. Geddes (TV’s eWhisper) covered one of their keyword tools, their new free analytics program (coming soon), and touched on the contextual hype.
Check out the official MSN Adcenter Blog for more updates.

Google appears to be adjusting its adwords algo this weekend, increasing the weight of “quality score of the landing page” .

As usual they do not declare what aspects of it are changing, so those who have numerous sites out there will hopefully be able to tell what exactly seems to be making an effect. It is strange that pay per click used to be a pretty simple model, now it is changing to a secret sauce no secrets shared model similar to that of their traditional organic model.

I think it is fine to have secrets, but when you are paying for traffic all things should remain open and defined. CTR x CPC was a great model, it maximized value for them and forced advertisers to write better ad copy.

Now we have CTC x CPC x ????unkown algrithmic characterists???? = advertisers paying different prices for the same product.

I think as a whole, adwords has become harder to use and their new adjustments end up hurting all advertisers more so than just the ones who do arbitrage. I think if they want to control arbitrage they should control either A. eliminate arbitrage sites from being able to buy traffic, or B. control their AdSense sites.

Some discusion here at threadwatch .

What is your take on the whole situation?

An interesting email arrived from Yahoo! today stating that I could easily import settings from an US Yahoo! Search Marketing (overture) account to a UK overture account.

We’ve made it easy for you to set up a new UK account. By creating a sub-account that sits conveniently within your existing account, there is no need to re-enter information we already have collected. Simply visit the link below and fill out the registration form. A UK client services representative will contact you via email with more instructions and account setup confirmation.

This is obviously not a full blown roll out of Panama but it is a huge step forward for Yahoo! to bring their PPC accounts into ONE centralized company, VS having to have 10 accounts at separate Yahoo/Overture sites to handle 10 different countries.

The signup page is located here, and states:

Start your UK sub-account

Setting up a sub-account is easy and you can simply transfer your existing listings to your new UK account. Just fill out and submit the sub-account request form below, and you’ll be contacted via email by our UK Client Services team for account set-up confirmation.

I am not sure if anyone has tried this yet, but it is a step in the right direction in my opinion and would love to hear your feedback on how it works.

Got this from MSN today in the mail, it looks like they will be making some much needed changes to AdCenter this evening.

>>>>>
Hello Everyone,

Guess what’s happening today, between 4PM and 10PM PST?

For one thing: The MTV Movie Awards are finally here!

If this doesn’t excite you, how about: Brand new Microsoft adCenter features are being released.

During this time, we’ll be upgrading several features in adCenter, including:

A new Reports page user interface
* Create a New Report tab
* Recent Reports tab
* Report Templates tab
* Customize date ranges
* Schedule and save reports
* Download reports

Additional reporting upgrades
* Schedule and run multiple reports in the background while you are working in adCenter
* Run more than 10,000 rows of report data (downloadable in .ZIP format)
* Run reports in multiple formats .TSV (Tab Separated Value) and .HTML formats
* View the previous 20 reports in the Recent Reports tab

We’ll also be launching our new Video Help that will provide a variety of step-by-step videos explaining adCenter tasks and information.

There are a few other goodies in there so be sure to check in after 10PM PST (or whenever the last “golden popcorn” is handed out) to explore the new features.

P.S. During this time you will not be able to access adCenter – but don’t worry, your current keywords and ads will continue to run.

Google has finally opened up the beta test of AdWords editor to all of its users. The software is available for download at this link.

I was lucky enough to have access to this for a few months and found it to be a great piece of software. It really helps out when trying to upload large keyword lists. You can save hours of time by knowing what you are doing in excel and pasting things to AdWords Editor.

My only suggestion would be to be able to upload a bulk upload style sheet that contains both ads, keywords, adgroups, etc, like the one you can download. Or can we just change the extension of a csv and trick the tool into thinking it is an accoutn snapshot?

Either way, thank you Google, this is a sweet tool!

Oh Snap! It seems like the shit may have hit the fan a bit for YSM / Overture today. Apparently there is a class action lawsuit that has been filled against Yahoo for participating in click fraud. I found the article in the Washington post by the way of webmaster world.

An interesting point in the article is that it seems like Yahoo would poor on the clicks when their quarterly reporting was due, which is a brilliant strategy by them…but shady as hell. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Advertisers have been bitching for as long as I can remember about how crappy the traffic is from Yahoo and that it has only gotten worse as time goes on.

Numerous complaints about pay per click arbitrage as well as one page domain landers have been posted all up and down the overture forum at WMW. About a week or so some dude put out some 10 minute long video documenting how wrong all this stuff is…found here at youtube.com.

The funniest thing is that GrayWolf put out a how to article (actually a series) on how to do pay per click arbitrage on his blog in a three part series. I, II, III

So there you have both sides of the fence…those complaining about the practice, and those showing you how to do it. What are your thoughts on this whole mess? How do you think this will affect the future of the pay per click market and what do the engines need to do in order to stop this?

I was just featured in an article in Bloomberg, and quoted near the bottom. I think the whole article gets a big part of it wrong…

From an advertising standpoint MSN is one hell of a value. First off it is targeted as hell, and you can make it more targeted with their crazy passport profiling… age, sex, location, etc… pretty nice stuff….but it is even more targeted in the fact that it is PURE MSN TRAFFIC. Google cannot claim this, yahoo cannot either…both of these companies have content networks that you can opt into but both also whore their feeds out to those who have massive traffic…

There has been some big news lately about domainers and how they are showing your ads when you are not supposed to be paying for it… I am not sure if MSN is just late to the game, or if they do not have plans for this…but either way right now their traffic is 100% MSN Search… BUY IT.

The article seems to have twisted the words to make it seem like people will not spend the money on MSN because the traffic is just not there…well buddy, we would spend the money if the traffic was there, but how can you raise your budget when it will not be spent?

I think the whole point of the article should be the following: MSN has shit (in terms of volume, not quantity) traffic, but a nice product at the moment, they need more traffic and users and there will be more ad inventory for their advertisers to buy…they seemed to have upped the ante by adding some sweet targeting features to their system that Google and yahoo currently do not have in place. Advertisers would love to spend more money with them, but they cannot do to the smaller market share that MSN has compared to Google.

The bottom line is: If you are able to get a nice return on investment on you advertising spend then you spend it… MSN does give a sweet ROI, we just want more volume and we will buy it.

Are you using MSN AdCenter, and if so what do you think of it and how is it working and converting for you?