The 11/25-12/1 edition of The Economist has a brief piece of click fraud. Some of their points:

• Internet advertising is a $27 billion business today and it should be $61 billion by 2010.  In 2001, it was just $9 billion.
• Click fraud comes up from two areas. First, advertising affiliates (read: the Google content network) create bogus clicks. Second, competitors click on your ads to exhaust your budget.
• What percentages of clicks are fraudulent? 10-50%, with an emphasis on the 10% range.
• Google and Yahoo are now taking the problem more seriously and both expect to have an independent auditing system by the middle of next year.
• One alternative to pay per click is pay per action.  The advertiser only pays on conversion.  This idea doesn’t have a lot of traction yet and, in fact, may be a non starter since it would link search engine compensation to factors outside of their control.

Great. So what can you do in the mean time?

My own strategy is simple. I never advertise on the content network (it never resulted in new customers for me, anyway) and, while my advertising is on I have a high enough daily budget that I’m sure I’m not going to run out. Oh, and I also track the IP addresses of visitors and complain loudly if I think someone is scamming me. Finally, I do some common sense things like add negative keywords for searches that Google sent my way even though they aren’t particularly useful.

Interestingly, having just done a search on Google, I can’t find anything which specifically says “Report Click Fraud” so I sent them a note asking how to do it. I’ll post their reply.

And, note to anyone from the Economist reading this: your leader on page 13 and your article on page 65 are so similar they’re practically redundant.  I expect better from you.

Just added to our corporate library a bit here by purchasing two marketing books from Amazon for a little light reading over the holidays (yes: Amazon prime one day shipping). They are Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, both by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg (with Lisa T. Davis in very small print).

Stay tuned for a more detailed review when I get back.

This caught my eye this morning. Technically, this JC Decaux bus stop is in Chicago, which is probably what Hamburg thought they were getting when they sought to advertise their now-concluded China Time 2006 event. But the bus stop is near a Sears that is on the very edge of the city. Across the street is Elmwood Park. If you look down the road in the picture, you can see that the area is mostly residential.

Talk about 0 ROI. I suppose I’m seeing it, which is something, and I’m blogging about it, which is also good. But I can’t image the cost of the advertisement justifies the payback from this post.

Yesterday, a prospect called to talk about her website. She had questions about search engines, site content and a whole lot more. We talked for about 30 minutes. Part way through the conversation she said “Design? Design is cheap. I’ll call India and they’ll do it for nothing.”

Then I got to ask one of my favorite questions: Why aren’t you calling India right now?

She paused for quite a while and then said, “Because I feel I can trust American companies more.”

IMHO, trust is the most important part of hiring a website maintenance provider. Trust lets you, the customer, describe what you want and turn it over. Trust means that you can talk with your provider freely about budgets and goals. Trust means you can concentrate on your business without having to worry about every little thing.

Trust is, unfortunately, a rare thing today. As a provider, it’s our job to build trust. How does any service provider do that?

First, communicate clearly, often and honestly with the customer about the work. That doesn’t mean always telling them what they want to hear. Sometimes you have to be the one who break the bad news.

Second, give prospects a way to try your services that won’t break the bank. For example, given the reduced rate and the advertising costs, we generally don’t make a profit on our New Customer Special.

Third, never commit to more than you can deliver no matter what the customer says. In fact, promise a little less and then deliver a little more. Your customers will appreciate this.

Building trust is a continuous process. We’re not perfect, but these are the kind of things we try to do every day. Writing them down is just a good way to remind ourselves that they’re important. Being trustworthy is a significant competitive advantage. It’s worth a lot more than saving a couple of bucks on labor by outsourcing to India or some other low wage location.

“Google Dance” was what we called it-that monthly-ish shuffling of search engine rank based on their every whim. So what I saw this last weekend can only be called the “Google Dance, Dance, Dance.”*

First, some background. I blog and, if you’ve talked to me about your site, you know I think you should, too. One of the things that sparked a blog entry was an error message in the new version of Apple’s iTunes. “iTunes is unable browse album covers on this computer.” It’s a terrible error message. There’s no possible cause and no explanation. So I complained.

And, two days later, my complaint was the number 2 result on Google for that error phrase. So I figured I’d go back, find out what the problem was and fix it. Over the weekend, my various posts when from position 2 to 4 to 6 and then, late Sunday night, to the sweet spot: #1. Hundreds of people are hitting the site. Hopefully the page is useful. No, I’m not making any money off of these visitors. Not yet, anyway.

I found three things about this process really interesting.