Google says it loses $1 billion a year to false ad clicks

22 Mar

Posted by admin as AdSense, News

Google Inc. loses about $1 billion US a year to “click fraud” or other invalid click-throughs on its ad service, the company says.

Advertisers have been asking Google for a clearer picture of the reach and effectiveness of their ads.

Google’s AdWords service brings together advertisers and websites willing to display their ads. Advertisers pay Google a fee based on the number of click-throughs, and site operators receive a commission for each time that a visitor clicks on an ad.

Special software that can click on an ad repeatedly can be used to inflate a rival company’s advertising costs or boost a site operator’s own revenue gained from displaying the ads.

“Our invalid clicks rate — the activity rate — has remained in the range of less than 10 per cent of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million [US per] year in potential revenue foregone,” Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, wrote in a post to the company’s Inside AdWords blog late Thursday.

Google does not charge its advertisers for clicks it determines to be invalid. For example, if 10 out of 100 clicks were excluded Google would not charge its advertisers for the invalid clicks, cutting into the company’s revenue.

The Mountain View, Calif., internet search giant had previously come under fire after earlier reports that as much as a third of click-throughs on ads the company offered were false.

Google settled a click-fraud lawsuit in July 2006 for $90 million US, with $60 million in ad credits going to the claimants and $30 million paid to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

“Click fraud protection is something we take very seriously, and it requires a great deal of research and development to do effectively,” Ghosemajumder said in the blog post.

“We are disclosing these network-wide figures in order to provide greater transparency to Google advertisers and the marketplace as a whole,” he said, emphasizing that the “figures illustrate the significant level of proactive protection we provide, and how this has resulted in minimizing the actual impact of click fraud on advertisers.”

3-stage system

Last year, Google launched a feature called the AdWords Report Center that shows advertisers how many clicks are being excluded.

In the blog post, the company explained that it determines which clicks are invalid through a three-stage system. Most of the illegitimate clicks are automatically detected analyzed and filtered out in the first stage, Ghosemajumder said.

The second part uses automatic and manual analysis of the AdSense network to weed out false clicks before they are logged to an advertiser’s account.

The final aspect is investigation of alleged false clicks reported by an advertiser. Just 0.02 per cent of click-throughs that are ultimately excluded fall into this category, Ghosemajumder said.

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Search Engines are Not the Be All and End All for Internet Success

31 Jan

Posted by admin as Articles, Traffic Stats

To be sure, Google, MSN, Yahoo and the like are all excellent ways of getting your name out there. But it can take a long time to get your site to the top of most of the major categories, and since the number of categories is only limited by the imagination of the typical Google user, getting the results that you want can sometimes take awhile. So while you are waiting to move up the rankings, what else can you do to improve the web presence of your law firm? What can you do to get more clients? What can you do to get better cases?

For one thing, you might want to take a look at what your kids are doing on their computers.

Facebook and MySpace are the scourge of teachers and employers everywhere. In many schools, a student caught looking at one of these sites during class ends up in detention, and younger employees caught on these sites during working hours can get reprimanded or worse. Wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia site that gives brief or lengthy summaries of almost everything, is also the scourge of academics because, since it is updated by users, it can be inaccurate. Many are the lazy college students who have been caught cutting and pasting a Wikipedia entry on their term papers.

While these sites are ridiculously popular with teenagers, they aren’t the only ones using them. Adults have caught on to the Facebook and MySpace craze, seeing them as a great way to stay in touch with friends and to find old ones. In terms of finding old friends, it has been said in some quarters that Facebook and MySpace may be the end of the high school reunion, simply because the internet makes it very easy to find and keep in touch with all of your old classmates.

YouTube, which is a site that allows people to post their own video content and others to view it free of charge, has enjoyed immense popularity, so much so that Google actually purchased YouTube in 2007 to the tune of about $2 Billion. So can you make these sites work for you? The answer is an emphatic yes, and the good news is that you can do it fairly simply.

Social Networking Sites
Signing up for Facebook and MySpace is absolutely free. What they allow you to do is to create a profile page, in which you can put whatever information you deem appropriate.

MySpace allows for more decoration and personal touch than Facebook, but as of right now Facebook is more popular. But considering that both are free, you should feel free to sign up for both. In the sections that you fill out to tell people about yourself, tell them that you are a personal injury attorney and tell them the practice areas that are your specialty. You are also given the opportuníty to include links, so give them the link to your website.

In order to make the site truly work, it helps to have “friends,” which is what happens when you link up to other members with their own pages. If your employees have accounts, become friends with them. If one of your clients has a MySpace or Facebook account, become friends with them. If your teenager can stand the utter embarrassment, be friends with him or her. All of this increases your profile and also gets picked up in Google and other search engines. MySpace offers you a blog to update, which is always good, and both sites allow you to post videos. This brings us to YouTube.

YouTube Video Sites
If you have already shelled out the money for a commercial to be aired, why not double up on the exposure by putting it on YouTube? And unlike paying for television air time, YouTube is completëly free. If you don’t have a commercial ready, you can certainly make one, or simply record the testimony of a satisfied client. You no longer need a high profile production team. These days, all you really need is a camera, some basic video editing software, and an imagination.

Wikipedia
Most people don’t like the idea of writing about themselves in the third person, but Wikipedia gives you a great opportuníty to post your professional biography and accomplishments online. Also, in the “references” section, you can link to your website, any articles that you might have written, or any newspaper articles describing cases that you have won. Also, due to its popularity, a Wikipedia page routinely pops up in the first page of Google for almost any subject that you can think of. These are only a few of the many ways that you can improve the web traffíc of your law firm. It doesn’t take much time, and the benefits greatly outweigh the effort that it takes to get started.

About The Author
At Foster Web Marketing, we provide full service web programs for attorneys all over the country. We provide web hosting, content writing and management, site design and search engine optimization services. If you are part of a personal injury law firm and are interested in raising the internet profile of your firm, go to www.fosterwebmarketing.com today. Via SitePro News

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10 Vital Tips for Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

31 Jan

Posted by admin as Articles, Web Development

The Web hosting firm you choose can make or break your small business. Good ones can run things smoothly, are easy to reach, and fix problems efficiently. But bad ones can have more problems than they are worth, be unreachable at critical times, and bring your business to a screeching halt. Finding a good one is crucial to your success.

Here are some tried and true ideas for how to select a host that will save you money, avoid technical snafus, and build your online platform for the future.

1. Choose a Service that Primarily Does Hosting
Although it might be tempting to sign-up with a firm that provides an umbrella of services in addition to website hosting, a good rule of thumb is that if a company overly-diversifies its services, it won’t deliver top quality in any of them (e.g. tech support, updates, maintenance, etc.)

2. Choose a Host with a Great Record for Online Security
Most secure hosts will provide SSL Certificates to guarantee your security. Without an SSL Certificate on your site, visitors may come and go without identifying themselves, and this could put your site at risk. Make sure your host implements best practices when it comes to maintaining security architecture, updating security software, and responding effectively to breaches if and when they do occur.

3.Excellent Technical and Customer Service Support via Phone
Does the host provide phone support around the clock? Or can you only email for help during non-business hours? You definitely want the option to call a staffer. Studies show that over-the-phone tech and customer support systems are vastly more efficient than e-mail support centers, on average.

4. Solid Add-On Services
A number of great web hosting companies provide little extras to make sites more effective and user-friendly. These can include image upload galleries, blogs, control panels, order forms, support scripts, databases, and embedded video features. When evaluating various firms, examine sample sites and note what value add-ons you like and what value add-ons you feel are missing in each sample.

5. Don’t Rely on Numbers Alone to Make the Decision
Many hosts promise uptime approaching 100%. But there’s no way of verifying that kind of claim. If your website goes down, for instance, the company can easily explain it away as a statistically insignificant outlier. Similarly, a potential host may brag about oodles of bandwidth and space on servers, but if your online small-business needs are modest, these numbers shouldn’t be your incentive. Finally, be wary of online rating systems. These figures can be jiggered and rejiggered to make a web host look better (or worse) than it actually is.

6. The Right Price for Your Needs
Sure, you can find a service for practically nothing. But there is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to web hosting. If you’re paying a dirt-cheap rate, chances are that the host is watering down services in some respect. Perhaps the host offers minimal security protections or charges clients “pay per play” for technical support. Or maybe the site charges a sky-high maintenance fee or other monthly fee. The point is, you need to read the fine print and to price-compare before making a decision.

7. Flexible Features and Enough Elbow-Room
You have no idea how your online platform might evolve. That’s why you need a hosting company that boasts flexible features, supports many different languages, offers linux and Windows options, and supports an array of scripts (PHP, Pearl, Java, etc.) A good rule of thumb for determining space is to “buy big”. In other words, even if you don’t have tens of thousands of files to upload and store, leave yourself some wiggle room to anticipate future growth.

8. An Easy-To-Use and Safe Shopping Cart
According to numerous estimates, U.S. and U.K. consumers will be spending nearly $150 billion per year online by the year 2010. Your site’s e-commerce options should be simple, safe, battle-tested, and easy-to-use.

9. Protection Against Spam, Viruses, Trojan Horses, and the Like
Most creditable web hosting sites provide solid e-mail protection. Make sure to check for compatibility, however. For instance, if you use Microsoft Outlook, make sure that the host has the tools and services to shield your Outlook e-mail effectively — without blocking key notifications from clients or suppliers.

10.Important Questions to Consider:

• Does the host provide good references and testimonials?
• Does the company employ best-of-breed firewalls and routers?
• Has anyone filed complaints against the company through the Better Business Bureau or other organization?
• What services do small businesses similar to yours use for web hosting?
• Can the company provide any statistics to back up claims regarding reliability and technical support?
• Can you use the host for a trial period before paying full price?
• How expensive is it to upgrade or downgrade plans?
• How do blogs and customer forums rate your candidate hosting services?

About The Author
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They provide a wide-range of services from linux Virtual Private Servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Via SitePro News

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