InsureMe Affiliate Blog: The Sausage Manifesto

Sausage Manifesto For a long time I tried to laugh off click fraud (nervous laughter actually). I used to regard click fraud as the cost of doing business in the PPC world. Then, I would try to rationalize that click fraud was a small problem that was being handled by the search engines to the best of their ability.

Over time though, I started to get the impression that Google and Yahoo might not be trying as hard as they need to clear up the problem. This became abundantly clear when we received refunds for “bad clicks” from Google that amounted to well under 1% of our total ad spend – even when the most conservative analysts figure click fraud is well above that number.

If you are a PPC advertiser, you are guaranteed to have had at least one memorable run-in with smack-you-in-the-face, super-obvious click fraud. For me, it was the addition of a new partner on Yahoo’s content network that led to an extra $2,000 of clicks in a twenty-four hour period. When I reported it, Yahoo! basically said “stuff happens” and did nothing about it. In the end, InsureMe had to eat the $2,000 and write it off as a lesson learned. (Lesson well learned – don’t trust Yahoo’s content partners).

As the money spent on PPC has increased dramatically over the years, so to have the number of unhappy/suspicious advertisers. Discontent is growing and it seems that we might be getting closer to the tipping point of PPC advertiser’s collective frustration with click fraud and the search engines denial of the problem. A leader in the crusade to get search engines more engaged in fighting click fraud is Jefferey Rohrs who, in a “Jerry McGuire moment,” wrote “The Sausage Manifesto.” (Get the .pdf version here).

In short, the manifesto calls for the search engines to treat advertisers with some respect, understand our needs, educate us, and start spending some more time and money to fight click fraud. Good stuff, eh?

If you are one of the many disillusioned PPC advertisers who feel like the search engines are looking the other way while people steal your money – make sure you read the manifesto. Actually, while you are at it, forward a copy of it to your PPC rep. at Google or Yahoo and tell them to pass it on to their supervisor’s supervisor. From what I can see, applying pressure to PPC companies is the only way the online marketing community will get any help in combating click fraud.

Fight the good fight my friends. :)

[If you want to get the Reader’s Digest version of the manifesto, read the Search Engine Watch post here.]

Thanks to Obey Giant for the image.

Comments

I also had a similar issue with Yahoo, where a click bomb resulted in a $20k spend in one day (where the max budget was $1k); to make matters worse, their automatic account replenishment tried to even things out by repeatedly debiting the account for $5k every couple hours. It was a nightmare, and really hurt that partner. Long live the sausage manisfesto.

Posted by: Cygnus | January 5, 2007 11:45 AM

HOLY COW! That is terrible. Did you ever get the money back?

Posted by: James Omdahl | January 5, 2007 04:00 PM

Since the AdSense/ContentMatch business seems to be booming, someone appears to be putting great trust in the value of non-search advertising on fourth-party sites.

I have always tracked my sales against advertisements and search terms. Unfortunately I had over $1,000 in "legitimate" content advertising costs without one single sale until I even realized I was paying for it - I was new to "search engine" advertising back then.

When I saw that more than 50% of your advertising costs can be lost in this dubious business I immediately turned most no-search advertising off - it seems impossible to get rid of all of it - and my margins increased dramatically.

Posted by: Magnus Wester | January 6, 2007 06:37 AM

I believe it's unfair to target only Google, Yahoo and MSN in this discussion. In my experience, the REAL fraud centers are the second-tier "search engines" - Enhance, ePilot (worst of them all), Looksmart, Lycos, Miva, Search123... Anyone making any profit there?

Posted by: Magnus Wester | January 6, 2007 06:44 AM

Magnus, the 2nd tier search engines are horrible. I used to find good traffic from Searchfeed and FindWhat (now Miva), but after 2004 that traffic got worse. I got clickfraud refunds from both companies and kept trying but was often seeing pretty much 100% click fraud. Don't waste your time.

James, as you know from our previous comment exchanges, I think the click fraud problem is overblown on Yahoo and Google. However, that's looking at it from a macro point of view. From a micro point of view, I often see serious problems.

Case in point: I have a client now who was seeing ~40% of the traffic from a bogus parked domain system. What makes this *really* bogus is that this campaign had Content network turned off. The bogus traffic was on the Search network. Here's where the junk clicks originated:

searchportal.information.com

Check your server logs! Have your affiliates check your server logs. Haven't seen traffic this bad on Google in quite some time. According to Alexa (pseudo-reliable) information.com has a traffic rank of 167 and 91% of that traffic is on searchportal.information.com. Doesn't that smell fishy? Looks like parked domains run by domainsponsor use this searchportal in frames.

Let me know if you see them in your server logs.

Posted by: Richard Ball | January 9, 2007 08:21 PM

Hey Richard - I appreciate the comment and always enjoy your insight.

I did go through and check our logs (through Google Analytics) and I saw that we did indeed have some traffic coming in from searchportal.information.com – although the amount of traffic was fairly small. Still – it is scary to think that so much bad traffic is coming through the search network. I think everyone who does PPC would appreciate their search traffic being true search traffic from established search engines, and all of the contextual and grey area traffic to be kept in the contextual advertising category…I guess a guy can dream, right?

If you all want to hear more about Richard’s findings I suggest checking out his post over on his blog called Is Google Partnered with Spammers?

Posted by: James Omdahl | January 11, 2007 09:55 AM