Most of the people I meet are paying $1 to $5 per click for generic keywords. And still the Click-through-Rate (CTR) is extremely low. Getting a response of 0.68 percent is considered very good in the Paid ads category.

To improve your mileage from the Google Adwords Campaigns, we have created a Free Adwords Expander Utility, which creates broad and exact match keywords for you automatically. All you need to do is to copy the output keywords, and then see your CTR increase.

Like most businesses, when I was introduced to Google’s Pay-per-Click advertisement program called Google Adwords, I was overjoyed. No more advertising in costly magazines and journals which hardly generate any leads. Here I only pay when someone is eagerly and actively looking for my product or service. Too good to be true… only pay for leads that click on your ad. So my ad can show for thousands of impressions a day, but I only pay for the handful of people who click on it and visit my web site.

And it was good too, because my business started getting leads that were hot – literally as soon as I started the ads. So I was happy… and I increased my daily budget on Google and increased my cost-per-click, so that my ad could rank higher up on the search result pages.

Clicks Galore…
And I naturally started getting more hits from this extra exposure. Getting 10-20 clicks and ever 40 clicks a day became the norm. My spending with Google also skyrocketed. As I became happier, I became complacent too… as long as I was getting more visitors to my site, I wasn’t complaining…

Until I got my latest invoice from Google. Boy, I was jolted right out of my seat. It seemed that Google had maxed out my daily budget times the 31 days in the month. I had got new business from Google, but I didn’t know I was getting this many visitors from my ad campaign.

A quick look at my Google AdWords campaign showed me a huge number of clicks over the past several days and weeks. The number wasn’t 20 or 30 clicks anymore. It was in hundreds of clicks a day. Funny, I hadn’t received so many quotation requests or emails from people joining our eMarketing Ideas Newsletter or commenting on our blog. Something funny was going on…

Content Targeted Ads Can Blow a Hole
Upon careful investigation, I found that people searching for my SEO & Email Marketing services had remained steady on Google. It was the Content Targeted ads that were blowing the hole in my budget. Everyday, I was getting close to 100s clicks on the content network.

Curious to know where these clicks were coming from, I started playing with the Google Adwords reports, looking for a way to find out where my ads show on the content network.

Google Ad Placement Reports
Good for me, as Google had recently introduced a new report called the Ad Placement Report, which shows where the ads are displaying on the content network. I ran the report for a month, and Wah! What did I find…

My ads were showing in thousands on a few good sites like About.com, my articles on eZineArticles are showing my ads too, but I also noticed that the most number of clicks were coming from a blog and a web site with a strange name. Well, if they are showing my ads, they must be relevant to my products / services. So I copied and pasted their URL on my browser window to see what these sites were about.

And was I amazed? These sites talk about gibberish, anything goes… the site is plastered with Google AdSense ads on the top, left, right and center. In fact, I had to scroll several pages to “find” the Content. which wan tiny, and not much relevant too.

The site had no Google Page Rank. If you don’t know page rank, visit our SEO FAQ section. And strange is that it had no Alexa ranking too. Next, I checked the domain for when was it created, and all the WHOIS information. Turned out that the site was registered about 3 weeks back, hosted in China, and was solely meant to display adsense ads.

And it was pretty clear to me that the owners or creators of the site were clicking on the ads themselves. Boy, I was angry. Very Very angry!

I immediately wrote to Google Adwords team about this site that was creating this massive click fraud. The good thing about Google is that they create a support ticket immediately, and told me that their Click Quality team will investigate it within 3 days.

Seems like their support center is moved closer in Asia, because all my support tickets were answered in the day time, and promptly. I was happy and within 3 days I got a reply back confirming my doubts. They found the site, and identified it to be a Fraudster, generating invalid clicks. They banned them for life, and told me a refund was on its way.

Although with a good ending for me, it was a harrowing experience altogether. I had reduced my Google advertising budget, and was spending much more time monitoring my ads in the last week than required.

A Lesson Learnt
This happened to us because we were too focused on managing our clients Ad accounts. We used to spend a lot of time tweaking their ads, increasing their Click-through-rate (CTR), and getting them higher placements. In fact, we had no time to spend on our own Google campaigns.

This was a good lesson learnt. There were many takeaway pointers for me, and would like to share with you too.

1. Never leave your Google Advertising accounts unattended or running on auto-pilot. Keep checking on a daily or weekly basis in the least. If you have outsourced your advertising to a Search Marketing (SEM) company, ask for regular reporting, and do some spot checks – ask for ad-hoc reports on clicks, content network etc. for a specific period. They should be able to provide that to you fairly quickly, and you can get a bearing of what’s going on.

2. Setup separate bids for ads showing on the content network. Typically the leads coming from the content network are not that “hot”, so you don’t have to bid the default set for the Search network. Of course, Google tries to keep your bid from the Search network as the default for the content network too, but you can change it only if you know where to.

3. Look for trends: how many clicks you get on a daily or a weekly basis – a sudden hike or plunge can point you to what went wrong.

4. Analyze all your previous ad trends for the last whole year, and write to Google if you suspect you have been a victim of click fraud and claim back your spent money.

Lastly, a plug for our own SEM Services, We are now managing Google Ads for a few very prominent business and professional practices in Singapore, and our clients are very happy with the results. If you would like to enquire about managed advertising on Google or Yahoo to get more leads, more “hot” prospects looking for your products or services, do contact us for a quote quickly, and get the extra exposure you need.

To your success…

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash
CEO, BrandRich Marketing
* Focused on Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing on the Internet & Email Marketing
http://wvw.brandrich.com

The Advanced match type is a matching feature of the Sponsored Search product that includes your listings in relevant search results, even when they aren’t exact matches with your keywords.

The following are examples of the keyword range covered by the Standard and Advanced match types.

The Advanced match type is already activated in your account, but you can refine the matches it generates using Excluded Words. This feature allows you to filter out certain irrelevant search queries.

For example, using the keyword “plasma television” and the excluded word “repair,” your listing will not be mapped to the search query “plasma television repair.”

Make the most of the Advanced Match Type, when used along with the Excluded words, and benefit from it. If you stay in the United Kingdom (UK), and you don’t have a Yahoo Search Marketing account, you can sign-up for one quickly.

Start with £50 credit in your new Yahoo! Search Marketing account and see your company rise to the top of the search results.

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash
Editor, TheSEObible.com

So what’s new with Sponsored Search at Yahoo. Plenty!

The biggest change is that instead of seeing the top 5 bids, you would now see a range of bids -from highest to lowest.

According to Yahoo, “The bid information displayed within your current account will soon change. As advertisers upgrade their accounts, their bids will no longer be reflected in the current system. To ease this transition and help provide you with accurate bidding information, in approximately six to eight weeks you will see two new data points on the Manage Bids page: First, you will see a bid range for prime placement. This bid range will tell you what advertisers are currently bidding for the spots at the very top of the search results page for each keyword (Example: $.75 – $.25).

Second, you’ll see an estimate of your average position for each listing. Each time you enter a new bid this estimate will change, so you’ll be able to tell where your listing is likely to appear for a given bid. Once these two new pieces of information become available, you’ll no longer see the Top 5 Max Bids column displayed in your account.

Please note that there will be no change to the way listings are ranked for the remainder of 2006; they will continue to be ranked by bid as they are today. Early next year, we will change the way ads are ranked, taking ad quality into account, as well as bid. More detailed information will be provided regarding this change before it occurs. ”
With these changes, I guess we are going to lose the granularity of knowing the top 5 bids and adjusting our position.

Now we will have to try with different bid amounts, and see what position we will get. This would make it more time consuming and cumbersome. Yahoo, I am not sure why you did this move – is it to cloak the individual bid amounts, so that people bid more to be placed, and with the confusion going on, you would ultimately squeeze more money out the pockets of holiday advertizers…

Sorry Yahoo, but I am not “for” your new changes. It sucks! I thought having a more transparent model for Pay Per Click advertising was better than Google in some aspects. That’s because Google’s model is not really PPC – they give credence to the CTR based on relevancy, and we pay less if we have a better performing ad. But at Yahoo, we could tweak the bid, and be assured of a certain placement. Now this will create more confusion, and more hit and trial before you are happy with it.

If you need more information – go look it up at the Yahoo upgrade centre.

I will post more information as it becomes available and I test it out. Keep your eyes peeled folks.

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash,
Editor, TheSEObible.com