Do you look out for ads which are blended well with the content of the website to avoid clicking on them? Have you ever click on ads unknowingly until you realise you are divert to another website? This has happened to me many times and it is certainly not a good experience.
According to ClickForensics, the industry click fraud rate has climbed to the year’s highest level of 14.2%. In my opinion, I believe this may be due to the increasing number of websites which contains mostly ads but with no real content. These websites provide visitors with misleading information cheating money out of advertisers. At this rate we are going, the death of adsense may be slowly manifesting itself.
According to the report, the amount of click fraud rate for affiliate sites was significantly higher than the industry average. I believe this will be worse for niche markets. This is not good news for affiliate marketers who depends on PPC to drive traffic to their website because they will be spending much more money to bring the visitors to their site. This also affects conversion rate as most of the visitors are sent to the site by mistake.
Hopefully that the people involved in click fraud will come to their sense as this click fraud is not doing any good for everyone. There ought to be a better way to earn money!
Hope that this also serves as a wake up call to those who only depend on PPC to drive traffic. It is time to consider other methods to drive traffic as I believe click fraud is not going away easily in the near future. You may like to read this article from ClickForensics to find out more.
Tags: Click fraud, PPC, traffic, affiliate marketing
Yup. Clickfraud is a problem. The real question if what constitutes clickfraud:
1) People purposely clicking on their ads?
2) People blending their ads to look like content?
3) People organised as affiliates to co-click each others ads?
4) People organised as content spammers & co-clickers?
I personally think that it is not going to go away and what we need to do is not to rely on just one way to drive traffic but to use multiple way to drive traffic. Some of the ways are:
1)SEO
2)Ezine Advertising
3)Article Marketing
4)Traffic Exchange
5)Web 2.0
6)Social Bookmarking
7)Viral Marketing
There are so many ways we can drive traffic so let use some of the ways listed and I am sure we will have a much stable traffic.
John Tan
Yes John. I agree with you too. I personally think that mybloglog itself is a very good traffic generator. Whenever you visit other blogs, your picture will show up and in turn, attract others to visit your blog or join your community if they like what you are blogging. Cheers!