How to Boost Your Earnings Per Click - A Special Report for Publishers and Ad Networks

Advertiser's Fears:
Publishers compete for a piece of an advertiser's online budget. Advertisers are interested in sites which will drive quality traffic and reduce wasted spend. Publishers who understand advertisers' concerns have a competitive advantage.Publishers should ask...
What is the advertiser's perspective?
How severe do advertisers think my fraud level is?
How are search providers responding?
How are advertisers responding?
How should publishers be responding?
TheAdvertiser'sPerspective
Advertisers are willing to pay for quality traffic which drives business. The cost per click model is a performance-driven business model for advertisers. From the advertiser perspective click fraud is any click that does not meet a business objective (e.g. brand growth, driving conversions, research, etc.).Low quality traffic to an Advertiser includes...
Bots. Bots are computer programs which click on links and increase PPC costs. Advertisers want to target humans, not machines.
Repeat clicks. Traffic that clicks on the same paid ad repeatedly has a lower ROI than single ad-click visits.
Hidden referrers. Advertisers want to know who is sending them traffic in order to conduct research and optimize their site experience. Traffic from hidden referrers is an immediate red flag to advertisers.
Bounces. Advertisers do not want to pay for bounced traffic (e.g. traffic that does not wait long enough to load and review at least one page).
A-typical Traffic. Advertisers do not want to pay for ‘fake' traffic i.e. traffic that navigates in atypical patterns without converting.
How severedo advertisersthink my fraud level is?
Advertisers consider publishers to be passing on fraudulent traffic if...
Publishers (knowingly or unknowingly) purchase fraudulent traffic.
Malicious bots are crawling publisher sites and committing click fraud.
Publishers are engaging in spamming other publisher sites.
Publishers are delivering traffic during times that are not desirable to advertisers.
Publishers are delivering traffic from geo locations that are not desirable to advertisers.
How aresearch providersresponding?
Advertisers are the Search Providers customers. Search Providers are responding to pressure from advertisers to provide them with higher quality traffic. They are responding in various ways...
Search Providers Rank Publishers. Web site or portfolios of sites receive a quality score rank. The rank is usually an index, indexing one publisher against competitive publishers. Quality rank impacts commission levels.
Search Providers Discount Clicks. Clicks are ranked based on traffic quality. For some networks, the quality of the click determines how much the advertiser pays for the click. Low click quality can cause CPC's to be adjusted downward resulting in lower EPC.
Search Providers Take Money Back. Search Providers give money back to advertisers for fraudulent clicks. Google claims that it gives back or does not charge for 10% of all clicks through its network; Yahoo claims 15%. A portion of these amounts represents money back to the advertiser which in return equals charge backs to publishers.
Search Providers Give Exclusion Control to the Advertiser. Many search providers, including Google and Yahoo, allow advertisers to ‘opt-out' of advertising with content network web sites. Soon, Google and Yahoo will start allowing advertisers to opt-out of search network web sites as well.
Search Providers Give Day Part and Geo Control to Advertisers. On the larger networks, advertisers can control the time, day or week, and locations their campaigns target.
How areadvertisersresponding?
Advertisers are getting increasingly savvy about their campaigns. Advertisers fight their exposure to click fraud in the following ways. These activities directly impact your bottom line:
Complaining. When advertisers find suspicious traffic that they don't like, they complain about it. Ad networks refund for any complaints that they find to be click fraud.
Excluding Publishers. If publishers drive poor quality traffic, then advertisers will exclude them. Click Forensics assigns SiteScores to publishers which rank the quality of traffic passed to advertisers. SiteScores under 500 are recommended for opt-out. SiteScore™ is a proprietary scoring system designed by Click Forensics which rates publishers on traffic quality.
Adjusting Ad Schedules. Advertisers schedule ads for maximum ROI. Times that do not convert are usually first to be cut from ad campaigns.
Opting Out of Geo's. Advertisers will opt-out of countries, regions, and cities that do not meet their business objectives or target markets.