While total online marketing spend continues to grow, the returns on that investment are increasingly under attack by a new type of click fraud-pay per click scams-perpetrated by those who exploit powerful brands for their own profit. Fighting pay per click scams reclaims lost web traffic, recoups otherwise lost revenue, helps build the customer base and improves the impact of every marketing effort pursued. As the defenders of the brand, and as those with the biggest stake in marketing effectiveness, marketers and eCommerce professionals have every reason to begin crafting a proactive strategy now.
White Paper Pay Per Click Scams: How Marketers Can Fight March 2010 Back and Win
Executive Summary
While total online marketing spend continues to grow, the returns on that investment are increasingly under attack by a new type of click fraud-pay per click scams-perpetrated by those who exploit powerful brands for their own profit.
Scammers, misguided affiliates and unscrupulous competitors place a company's branded terms within search ad copy, or use the terms as keywords to divert search users to sites which offer competing products or even to illegitimate sites offering counterfeit, pirated, or grey market goods. These pay per click (PPC) scams drive up costs for legitimate advertisers and dilute the effectiveness of online or search advertising.
How prevalent are pay per click scams? In the U.S. alone, scammers hijack nearly 600 million clicks monthly with illicit ads. These hijacked clicks drive up advertising costs for legitimate brands-and cost additional billions in lost revenues, reduced marketing effectiveness and brand dilution. The scams also affect brand loyalty and consumer trust as consumers, expecting to have an authentic brand experience, come across illicit sites or inferior goods.
Marketers and eCommerce professionals, severely impacted by PPC scams, should take the lead in fighting them. While the major search engines have complaint procedures, monitoring and taking action is, essentially, up to brands and the business professionals who build them. Fortunately, brands can fight this technology-borne abuse with technology-automated monitoring and response-enabling even the busiest marketing teams to address the problem.
Fighting pay per click scams reclaims lost web traffic, recoups otherwise lost revenue, helps build the customer base and improves the impact of every marketing effort pursued. As the defenders of the brand, and as those with the biggest stake in marketing effectiveness, marketers and eCommerce professionals have every reason to begin crafting a protective strategy now.White Paper: Pay Per Click Scams: Fight Back and Win
Contents
Experiencing Rapid Online Growth: Business. Marketing. And Fraud. ................................................................... 3
Pay Per Click Scams: Widespread, Powerful, Destructive. ...... 3
A Significant Problem-Especially for Marketers and eCommerce Professionals .................................................... 4
Search Engine Policies on Abuse: "It's Up to the Brand"........... 6
How Brands Can Fight PPC Scams............................................. 7
The Benefits of Taking Back The Brand....................................... 7
Conclusion: It's Marketing's Move. ............................................... 8
Appendix ......................................................................................... 8
2White Paper: Pay Per Click Scams: Fight Back and Win
Experiencing Rapid Online Growth: Business. Marketing. And Fraud.
Given its speed, lower costs, and powerful targeting abilities, the online world represents a highly cost-effective media platform for reaching customers and potential customers. Marketers are taking advantage of these opportunities to expand their business, devoting a steadily growing portion of their budgets to online marketing initiatives.
1In a survey of marketing executives, eMarketer finds that while offline media spends, including newspapers, magazines, television and radio, steadily decrease, Internet marketing spends are increasing 20 to 30 percent each year. The fastest-growing segment of those online marketing dollars goes to paid search marketing. In fact, between 2001 and 2012, spending on paid search advertising is on a pace 2to grow from 3 to 47 percent of online marketing dollars.
While legitimate brands are enjoying tremendous return on their paid search marketing investments, others profit, too: fraudsters are taking advantage of the Internet's openness, anonymity, and instant global reach, along with its lack of formal policing, to perpetrate online fraud and establish unauthorized distribution channels.
Pay Per Click Scams: Widespread, Powerful, Destructive.
Most marketers are familiar with the problem of click fraud-the use of automated scripts, computer programs or paid individuals to imitate legitimate clicks from users-a... [download for more]
