I always look at where traffic is coming from, especially from traffic that I purchase. Back in November a client’s site had a huge spike in traffic from junk ad sites. Most of the site ad ads from Yahoo and due to Yahoo’s less than optimal ad software I had to block these sites manually by domain. I had noticed in Compete.com’s site that competitor sites had also been receiving a lot of traffic from these sites.

Today (ok – I let this sit for a while LOL) I think I have uncovered at least one source of traffic to sites like that and confirmed my belief that the sites are as I had suspected junk click sites built for the sole purpose to generate content advertising publishing revenue.

Here’s how it works:

1. Internet users sign up for a site like www.treasuretrooper.com
2. They are offered 5 cents to click on links. When I first joined I was offered 7 links and could come back the next day to click some more.
3. There’s a message that says: “Receive 5 cents for each of the links that you click below! After clicking, please click any link that interests you on the page that pops up. You may click each of these links once every 24 hours. Please note that cash click earnings do not count towards reaching minimum payment.” and a few links:
   1. Asthma Relief Online
   2. My Diabetes Center
   3. Best Online Teaching Degrees
   4. Find Nursing Degrees Online
   5. Best Psychology Degrees Online
   6. Best Guide For Fitness
   7. Bank Account Wizard
   8. When I clicked Find Nursing Degrees I ended up here: Nursing Degree Answers which is a short page with a bunch of Yahoo ads.
   9. That site is similar to a lot of others I have seen that dynamically serves up Yahoo Publisher ads. Search on any topic and you will get different ads.
   10. TreasureTrooper.com is well ranked in countries like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India which is not bad by itself but if you are a US company doing business only in the US who don’t need that foreign traffic. Although according to Alexa almost 50% of their traffic in the US.
   11. In Alexa one of the suspect sites has 100% of traffic from US which I find hard to believe. However three of my client’s competitors receive between 5% and 11% of their traffic from India but they don’t do business in India.

There’s surely dozens of affiliate sites like these signing up people from low wage Asian or Eastern European countries where a $50+ a month can buy a lot. There’s something terribly wrong about this as someone makes $0.05 cents to click on a link where the advertiser is charged $1-$10+. For the advertiser is results in excessive clicks that don’t convert. If they are not aware of these sites they’ll end up paying a lot more for their online advertising budgets than they should.

Pay Per Click Campaigns

Pay Per Click advertisers only pay when an advertisement they placed on a Search Engine, Web Site or Blog is clicked to access the advertised content. From a cost perspective doesn’t matter how many impressions you receive since you only pay for clicks.

A PPC campaign is effective when properly managed. There are pitfalls which must be considered before initiating any Pay Per Click campaigns. These are:

* If not properly managed Pay Per Click can be expensive
* It’s possible to get involved in a bidding war drastically increasing PPC costs
* Advertisements placed on inappropriate web sites or content networks deliver un-targeted traffic, increase cost and lower campaign ROI
* As traffic increases so does the cost

Prepare PPC Budget

It is imperative at the outset of your PPC campaign to prepare a budget for the advertising campaign based on profit driven campaign goals such as; increased sales, leads for the sales department or other objectives identified through business Strategic Planning.

Decide on PPC Providers

There are many Pay Per Click providers available with the leaders being Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However Google has the most traffic and if you are tight for resources you can by with advertising just in Google as creating and maintaining a PPC campaign by yourself can be time consuming.

Although there are other PPC providers I prefer to work with the “Big 3″ as I have personally experienced “Click Fraud” and poorly targeted traffic when using other PPC providers. However, even when using the primary Pay Per Click providers, you must pay attention to where you ads will be displayed. The use of Google’s content network does have the potential to deliver poorly targeted traffic which is unlikely to convert into your company’s identified goals.

Watch out for “search network” or “content match” content on Yahoo & Bing as saavy black hat publishers have setup many sites that are 100% ads and often have offshore people clicking on ads all day. You can easily rack up $100s of dollars worth of useless traffic in a day. Yahoo allows you to blacklist sites, so keep an eye on your referrals and track traffic by keyword to be sure you are getting conversions on the right keywords.

Keyword Selection

The selection of keywords is critical to the success of your PPC campaign. The keywords are used to develop your ad title, ad content and landing page content, and therefore must capture your target audience’s attention immediately.

Investigating potential keywords is essential to obtain a reasonable ROI from your PPC investment. Cost per click varies depending on how popular the keywords are, and how much traffic they are likely to generate.

Paying for the #1 position is not always necessary, often the best strategy is to pay for positions 3 or 4 which are still highly visible and less expensive. You will receive less clicks but generally your conversion rate will be higher on the clicks you receive so the end result is the same and you pay less money!

To do more Keyword Research use a tool. Two very good services for keyword suggestion tools are Wordtracker and Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, both use different processes providing varying results. Another tool which should not be overlooked is Google’s Keyword Tool.

Ad Creation

The key to effective Ad creation is writing ad title and copy that uses the keyword / keyword phrase in an attention grabbing manner using very few characters. You only have seconds to grab your target audience’s attention, thus the importance of writing attention grabbing ad copy.

The use of action verbs, limited time offers, specials and identifying the benefits of your service or product are important factors in developing your PPC advertisements to encourage the “click”.

Landing Page Development

For each ad campaign you can greatly improve your conversion rates by developing landing pages specific to the ad content.

There are two types of landing pages: Reference pages and Action pages.

Reference pages provide the visitor with detailed information about the ad offers and should be relevant and include the keywords and phrases used in the advertisement. Action pages should include motivation to encourage your visitor to complete the transaction or conversion identified in the Pay Per Click planning process.

Key items in a Landing Page Include:

* Headline – Relevant call to action
* Prices, bonuses and special offers appropriate to advertisement
* Page Body Copy – Easy to scan copy detailing product or service benefits
* Sub Headers and Tag lines – action orientated, problem solving
* Buttons and Links – Easily accessible and identifiable to encourage conversion

Multi-variation Testing (A/B Testing)

It is important to test the effectiveness of your ad and your landing pages. Typically A –B testing is the most informative, enabling you to compare results from advertisements and landing pages which are similar but different while targeting the same keywords and keyword phrases. However, it must be remembered that without significant traffic volumes A-B testing results can provide inaccurate results.

It is now time to try out your Pay Per Click strategies, one final comment is; Start your bids low and build, that is one key factor to keeping within your Pay Per Click budget and obtaining maximum ROI.

Now that Yahoo & Microsoft have signed a ten year deal, we’ll see Bing replace their own search engine shortly. Yahoo will focus on media and MSFT will focus on search. What does this mean for the search landscape? Will Yahoo & MSFT do more deals together or is this it? Now that MSFT has their teeth into YHOO will they eventually be able to purchase them or do they even want to anymore. Lets take a look at their deal…
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