Welcome to the real world, it's click fraud.

According to this article in the Las Vegas Sun click fraud is becoming an increasing problem in the search engine world of advertising. I'm reading this article and I'm discovering that there is a person here profiled who spends $20 per click to get people to come to their web site. If you're spending that much per click, you better be getting vital customers, rather paying customers. It takes a lot of sales to make up for a $20 per click because only a small percentage of people actually buy anything when they click on a link to your web site. Anyone who spends that much on a pay per click charge, needs to seriously consider revamping their whole advertising campaign. It's not that they're spending that much money, it may be fine, but it may make them more vulnerable to something like click fraud. If I have a few clicks that are fraudulent, it's not a big deal because I don't spend that much money on paid ads. But if you're getting into a click charge that is as high as that or even into any multiple dollar figure, you're talking about a higher exposure to something that's critical to your business.

I don't fault this person for using a pay per click strategy because in a lot of cases that make sense, within reason. I think it's wrong that people would put ads on their site and then click through them just to get a commission from someone like Google. It's morally repugnant and how do you live with yourself when you're fraudulently ripping someone off. As a matter of course, I won't use something like Google AdSense which puts paid ads on my site. There's nothing wrong with what Google does, that's not what I'm saying. The problem is why be associated with something that doesn't have enough protection in it right now against something like click fraud? I think people to do this type of thing should be penalized in some way and I don't know how that would be.

To the nice woman who is getting people to come to her site at $20 a click, might I make a humble suggestion. Instead of spending that kind of money on paid ads, you can get a nice search marketing campaign going that would give you better results over the long haul. That might be the better way to handle it. It's not impossible to get to the top of search engine rankings if your information is relevant and is on topic. Search engines want good relevant content making it to the top of their rankings and that's what their algorithm does. When you do that, then you don't have to play all the pay per click games, at least you're not at the mercy of them. I think the best way to stem the tide of click fraud is for each individual advertiser to take serious stock of what they do online and how effective some of these ads are. I think that some of the higher-priced ads are not effective and there's not enough return on investment to make it an ongoing campaign.

So at this time I would like to welcome everyone to the real world of cheaters who do fraudulent clicks for their own benefit. I think we're learning in the online world that if there's a way to cheat someone else out of money, people will do it. They been doing it with e-mail spam and many other things too numerous to mention. This is just one more in a string of scams perpetrated by a bad element that spoils it for the rest of us. I really hope people who use paid ads would be a little more careful about what they're doing at this time until things like click fraud can be better dealt with by the search engines. The major search engines don't like this either and they're trying to do things to get rid of it, but until they do, it would be wise to go easy on the heavy ad spending like what was profiled in the article referenced here.

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