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The
cost for pay per click advertising is on the rise. According to Jupiter
Research, the average click price will jump from US$0.29 in 2003 to
US$0.26 in 2004 and US$0.47 in 2009. And that's only the price for an
average keyword.
The
price for the top spot on Overture.com for "data recovery" is
currently US$4.30 per click. Google displays an average cost pay
click of US$9,10 for that keyword. That's quite a lot for a single click. But
do you get what you're paying for?
US$10
million for consumers that do not exist
Click
fraud is the practice of skewing pay-per-click advertising data by
generating illegitimate hits. Some statistics claim that as much as 50
percent of pay per click advertising in some competitive categories could
be the product of bogus clickers.
"John
Squire, vice president for product marketing for Coremetrics, which
provides consulting and Web analysis for online merchants like Eddie
Bauer, OfficeMax and CompUSA, estimated that the company's clients were
spending about US$10 million a year on fraudulent clicks. That is, they
are spending about US$10 million on consumers that do not exist."
Click
fraud is done by traffic affiliate partners of PPC search engines who make
a commission on paid clicks generated by their web site visitors and by
competitors who want to decrease the effectiveness of your pay per click
campaign.
Some
of them hire human clickers or use automated programs that click the paid
listings for them. More information about click fraud and the different
methods can be found in these articles:
What
does this mean to you?
Pay
per click advertising can be a good way to quickly get visitors to your
web site. However, pay per click advertising should only supplement your
normal search engine optimization activities.
It
should not be your main way of getting search engine traffic. Track the
return on investment for your pay per click campaigns to make sure that
pay per click advertising really works for you.
A
Consumer WebWatch study showed that web surfers prefer
non-paid search engine listings. For this reason, it's better to get
high rankings in the normal search engine results. High rankings in
search engines will bring your web site targeted visitors without paying
for every single click.
Copyright
by Axandra.com
Internet
marketing and search engine ranking software
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