Click Flawed. Are you wasting money?

Lawrence Jones, November 22nd 2006, 11:01AM

There is no bigger fan of Google than myself, but is Google perfect? I often get asked questions about click fraud and from my close dealings with the Google team, I believe they work extremely hard to ensure click fraud is minimised. Of course you cannot guarantee that small volumes of unnecessary clicks will happen, however this in my opinion is a small price to pay for an overall effective market tool.

I think the problem Google faces is far greater and not too far away either. Over the past few years the people “in the know,” the SEO specialists have been making hay whilst the sun shone. They have been happily picking up a huge amount of new business from what seemed like a limitless pot.

Although this pot is growing each year with the numbers of users embracing the internet, it is not growing in the same proportion to the number of marketers prepared to use the internet to win business and their increasing marketing budgets.

So what happens when the expectations of the marketers bidding for a sector are greater than the volume of available visitors? Obviously the price per click goes up, but then what? In a perfect world if there are no more visitors Google would simply not send you more traffic.

There is a danger that when you use the “broad match” system that you receive visitors that are less potent. In my opinion it is imperative you remain in total control of the type of visitors you get to your site, and therefore recommend using broadmatch with caution.

More visitors does not necessarily bring you more customers. To combat this potential problem if you are using broadmatch, please make sure that you use negative keywords. This does limit the damage.

As someone who regularly stands up and talks to marketers across the country explaining how to create real success using the internet, I regularly sing the praises of Google and explain that they work diligently in their quest to be the best most effective search engine. I explain that Google’s goal is to provide their customers with the most relevant site possible. However be warned, it is very easy to make very expensive mistakes. I come across clients who make them all the time.

Tags: google, pay per click, ppc, seo, seo campaign