Impressions 1 Clicks 1

With Google AdWords releasing the Content Placement Report function in Hong Kong, I have been run off my feet sifting through thousands of domains to be sure my ads are visible where I want them to be. The site exclusion tool has been utilised extensively and also the keyword tool to engage negative keywords that I had not thought of previously.

After many adjustments it becomes evident that in about half of my campaigns I need to turn off content placement due to the overwhelmingly poor placement offered by Google. This is most likely due to similar words that exist in my extended broad match keyword selections. They are working for search results - just not content match. Disable content match on these Campaigns.

Previous efforts of content match heralded very poor results and hence were disabled due to the difficulties of sifting through data logs. So in this respect the Content Placement Report is great as I can see exactly which campaigns get the most relevant results.

The reports show however many listings with Impressions:1 Clicks:1 over my 7 day report. My questions are:

• Who are these people clicking on these ads?
• How many people visit this site?
• How does the owner of the site generate clicks when there are so few visitors?
• If I had my own site employing AdSense would I click on my own ads?
• Is this click fraud?

These questions worry me as if they are click fraud by the owners of the sites in question, then click fraud must surely be higher than we are led to believe. From my report, I have about 45 results that show this scenario and 45 results that look believable. The believable results show anywhere between 4-100 impressions and 1-5 clicks respectively.

I have my own site, hiking-hong-kong.semtek.net where I run AdSense to get an idea for how the system works. Not much traffic comes to this site and so no-one clicked on any of my ads for a while. I decided to test it out for myself just to check that it was setup correctly. Sure enough I created 1 impression and 1 click for an unsuspecting advertiser, though I did find some very informative information in the process about global warming.

Of course there are other possible scenarios that may result in similar statistics. If articles are updated frequently, they get shifted off the home page quickly and thus so too does the ad if it is only related to that shifted information, resulting in very few impressions and clicks. I’m sure there are other possibilities also.

There are also further possibilities to how we get Impressions:1 Clicks:1

• Programs that used IP proxies to click on content matched ads.
• Networks of clickers who are paid to click on content matched ads.
• Software that invades unsuspecting computers and then turns the computer into click-robots that click on content matched ads.
• Enewsletter campaigns and other claims stating that a portion of money earned from clicks on sponsored links will go to charity.

The fact is that AdSense is there to make sites money. People like money. People will go to some lengths to earn money. Therefore I tend to lean towards the fraudulent explanations - especially since there are more of them.

But in retrospect it is not generally a good idea to exclude all of these sites. Perhaps a better solution would be to analyse each site in question. Determine their traffic rankings and allow for at least one month of data to come in on content placement. Are they ranked well? Does the site look legit?

Popularity: 11% [?]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 11:59 am and is filed under Google AdWords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.