"Pay-Per Click"

23 Ways To Use An Ad Tracker

2007-11-11T07:45:00.003-08:00

The ad tracker was originally developed to provide a record of all hits to a site resulting from ad placements. This article shows a host of different ways to utilise an ad tracker. FOR AFFILIATES #1. The Long Url Problem Have you ever seen an ad where you are asked to click on an affiliate URL so long that it stretches over 2 lines, like this http://www/anysite.com/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/.cgi?code=123RT&type=102 35&subid=89715 Do you think your reader will bother to do the necessary cut and paste to put it in a browser? Probably not. And that's probably one lost sale. And even a one line affiliate link may exceed the permissible length for some ad posting requirements. The solution: use a short tracking URL. #2. Losing Your Affiliate Code As an affiliate you may have your affiliate code embedded in a link something like this: http://www.abc.com/123 Some customers will bypass the affiliate code and just type in the home URL http://www.abc.com (possibly because they think that they will be paying extra for an agent's commission) The solution: use a tracking URL - so that your affiliate code number is never seen. #3. Make Your Ad Stand Out You may have seen search engine results showing near identical listings for the same product, differing only in an affiliate code appended to the URL. Your listing here will be just one of many unless you make it stand out. So bypass the standard affiliate URL and use a tracking URL. #4. How Effective Are The Links You can measure and compare the effectiveness of the different banners or text links the affiliate programs provide you by using a tracking URL. #5. Changing Links If an affiliate company change their links then your existing ads, wherever they are posted, become worthless. But if you use a tracking URL you simply revise the affiliate URL at the tracking control centre. #6. Affiliate Program Discontinued Similarly if an affiliate program is discontinued you just change your tracking URL to a new page where you explain the circumstances and point your visitor to your other promotions. #7. Better Affiliate Stats Not all affiliate programs provide you with stats about visitors. And if they do are they adequate ? Compare a basic monthly figure say - Jan: 39 hits with a detailed analysis such as - Jan 12: 10 hits - Jan 13: 2 hits - Jan 20: 21 hits - Jan 21: 6 hits where you can relate those dates to particular ad campaigns. Tracking URLs will give you these improved figures. #8. Checking Affiliate Stats Even if you do receive good stats from your affiliate program it still makes sense to use tracking URLs so that you can compare your figures with theirs. A large discrepancy could mean errors in their software or (hopefully not) fraudulent activity on their part. An alternative reason is that their measurement takes place when their page is fully loaded rather than at the start, indicating that visitors are clicking away because it is taking too long to load. FOR EZINE PUBLISHERS #9. Win Advertisers With Tracking Reports If you sell advertising space in your ezine you can offer to your advertisers to replace their URLs with your tracking URLs and Email them the results. Tell your advertisers about these benefits in your advertising guidelines - They will know the number of clickthroughs their ad has generated. They can then decide how to improve the ads for better performance - If they use a tracker program with your own domain name in the tracking URL your ezine subscribers will be more inclined to click - They can use your ezine as a test centre, modifying their ads until they are happy, before launching with other publishers #10. Use Tracking Report Results The tracking reports above will provide you with information on your subscribers' interests, influencing your editorial content and helping you select which potential advertisers to approach. Also, once your advertisers have seen for themselves the benefits of an ad tracking program they will be inclined to purchase one. So set yourself up as an affiliate for a program and promote it to them. #11. Measure Your Readership You may know how many subscribers you have but how many actually open and read your ezine and which parts of it attract most attention ? Here's how to find out if you distribute your ezine in HTML Format: include an image on your page, e.g a banner or logo or a single pixel GIF. Then reference this image with a tracking URL. For an ezine distributed as plain text it is not possible to see if it is actually opened or read. But what you can do is insert tracking URLs at the appropriate points, such as product offers or special articles, and get comparative figures for which items are being read. AT YOUR WEB SITE #12. The Problem Of Permanent URLs Web sites are continually evolving and changing. You may want to rename a page to make it more consistent and logical but there's a huge problem. You have given out the URL in an ebook, or a directory submission, or an article or wherever. There's no way you can undo this. The solution ? Never provide the actual URL, just a tracking URL. You can then just edit the link at the tracking centre whenever a page is moved or renamed. The external links, in your ebook for example, stay the same but they will redirect to your new page. #13. What Are Your Visitors Doing ? You have text links all over your site, links to your other pages and links to recommended sites. Where are your visitors clicking ? Where are they leaving your site, why, how can you stop them ? Which graphic do they click on the most ? Do they click on the text link more than the graphic link? Your log files may tell you at best which are the most popular pages at your site but it is vital to know how your visitors move through your site and what is tempting them. Use tracking URLs to replace actual links wherever you need to monitor click activity. #14. Sell Website Advertising Space You can offer tracking reports to your advertisers in the same way as for ezine publishers (above). #15. Stop Piracy If you have invested man-months of time setting up a vital resource site involving a directory of links it's very easy for a pirate to simply copy your page and provide useful content for his own site. If you use tracking URLs for those directory links you can detect this copy - because the ad tracking program will record the referring URL. At the same time of course you can measure the popularity of the directory links. USING PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINES #16. Better Click Activity Reporting Pay per click search engines will report to you click activity on your URL. Engines vary in the frequency and format of the reporting so you can use tracking URLs instead to obtain better information. #17. Prevent Fraudulent Activity You can compare your figures with the engine's and should query any large discrepancy. If click activity is unusually high you may have a competitor clicking on just to incur costs against you. You may be able to detect this by comparing the figures for unique hits and actual hits (several hits per visitor). OFFLINE MARKETING #18. Check How Successful If you have ever wondered whether it was worth advertising off line because of the supposed impossibility of measuring the response then ad tracking URLs will answer that problem. Just include them in your ads in - newspapers - magazines - flyers - billboards - press releases - shop notice boards - and so on #19. Use The Time Reports The date and time when clicks are made will allow you to check the progress of your ads, for example - has your newspaper ad been submitted yet ? - has your billboard notice been removed ? - how long does a magazine ad stay around ? For a long running ad you can study the response and switch the link midstream if necessary to an improved web page. EBOOKS #20. Do Free Books Work ? The main purpose of a free ebook is to get the reader back to your site. But how successful is it proving ? Put tracking URLs in the book and you will find out. #21. Maintain Control After Download Once your ebook is downloaded it would appear that you no longer have any control over it. Not so. You can redirect the reader to other pages of your site by changing the tracking Url links. OTHER WAYS #22. Become An Ad Tracking Affiliate Since ad tracking programs are high demand marketing tools you can profit by joining their affiliate program (if they have one). Owning the product that you promote always gives that extra advantage e.g you can give an example of how you use it or a personal testimonial as to how it has benefited you.

SEO Advertisting & Pay Per Click PPC

2007-11-11T07:44:00.001-08:00

Advertising can be an easy way to break into the internet but there are many downsides to it. Unless you are running a community based site, have a site offering very unique content, a valuable service or product the traffic usually only comes as long as your paying for it. Of course ad campaigns can also be very expensive to run and maintain so you need to be sure your squeezing everything you can out of it. You should only proceed with a ad campaign if you are positive your site is the best it can be, otherwise you may just be pouring money away. There are thousands of companies on the internet who offer to provide you with ad campaigns, many of which never deliver, do not let any of these points put you off advertising. If you want quality traffic with affordable prices you are recommended to stick with the major search engines and their partners. Google Adwords, Overture and MSN are all well respected companies which will deliver you the best traffic. All of the forementioned websites use pay per click systems which can be perfect as they drive traffic with keywords you specify directly at your site, these advertisers are all interlinked with the main search engines so you should expect to get the most widespread sections of the population from them. Because they have the traffic numbers to support ad campaigns there can sometimes be bidding wars on popular keywords, I advise you to stay away from popular keywords and do your research. Overture provides a free Keyword Selector Tool which can help you find out how much traffic similiar keywords recieve each month, these are usually a lot cheaper and still provide the same high quality traffic. As I mentioned before advertising wont necessarily mean a good flow of traffic after you stop paying, other routes of advertising can mean you get listed in a search engines immediately for a set fee. Yahoo offers the ability to pay for a index within their search engine or directory, although your site still needs to abide by the same rules as other sites it gives you the opportunity to get indexed immediately within the search engine, a more subtle way of advertising power. Alternatively you can find quality sites that are related to yours on Sitepoint.com and WebHostingTalk.com who may be willing to put a one way link up for a nominal fee. You may find websites on the internet offering "banner exchanges", "free traffic" and other such promises, I wouldent look at them twice unless you want to lose out. The traffic they send you is of the worst quality, many of these websites operate bots, own networks of link farms and even pay people to visit your site. This of course means that no one being referred from these sites are actually interested in your content or services, in worst case scenarios you may even end up being banned from search engines due to these malicious sites. Even if they are reputable companies it is hard to judge whether they will work for you, many of the smaller search engine companies simply do not get the traffic to give you value for money.

You Gotta Think -- Strategic Internet Marketing!

2007-11-11T07:43:00.006-08:00

There are a number of great ways to promote your online business offline. Combining offline advertising with your online presence will create momentum and increase your profits. There are a number of ways to promote your business offline. Generate traffic. Produce sales. Increase profits. Those words are gold to every business with a Web site. But an overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs don't ever reach their goals of gold. This is mainly because there seems to be an unwritten code of Web advertising. It states you can only be successful on the Internet if you are using online advertising methods like search engines, banner ads and buying online ad space. True, this should be a factor in any company's marketing efforts but there's an old rule of advertising you should Consider... offline. There are three main offline-advertising mediums worth investing in to drive people to your site. Print, television and radio ads are fairly inexpensive and have the power to promote your dot com presence effectively. It’s cheaper and more effective than you think. Print Newspaper advertising Newspaper advertising is an easy way to get your message in front of a large audience. When placing these kind of ads you want to put them in the business opportunities or work at home section of the classifieds. If you are only going to run them one day a week focus on the Sunday edition as this normally has the highest circulation. If possible run the ad consistently as this will build some familiarity with the readers and will lead to better response. Be sure to find out the circulation and compare the cost with the circulation to find the best deals. I would also suggest you “test” a few different ads and keep track of the results of each. Here are some examples of ads I have run recently: STOP reading classified ads make money from them instead... If they’re making money you can too: For example:- We recently signed up to the affiliate program at http://www.cashloopholes.com, They pay 50% commissions on their product. In the national exchange and mart it costs just £80 for a one week advert in the business opportunities section. There were other betting guides in there and they have been for a long time so I knew they were making money. This one guarantees to win, 100% of the time. None of the others can do that so we was one step ahead already by promoting such an exceptional product. The ad read FREE MONEY LOOPHOLE If You Could GUARANTEE, With Absolute Certainty, The Outcome of an Event BEFORE You Placed a Bet… How Much Money Would You Invest? HTTP://WWW.CASHLOOPHOLES.COM As it’s in the business opportunity section this ad immediately captures the attention of the reader, it’s intriguing and causes the reader to want to know more We placed the ad for 4 weeks and we set up an ad tracking service so we knew how well we were doing with it. In all we received Approximately 500 hits a day and made on average about 10 sales a day. Do the maths and you will see how profitable offline advertising can be. During the 4 week tester period we also had 46 people sign up as an affiliate under us earning us 15% of whatever sales they made. I am not saying this is the only or best product to sell, This is what we first used when we first started advertising off-line and it paid of extremely well for us. We have increased the ad size now costing £290 a week but the increase in traffic makes up for the extra cost 10 fold. Its always good to start small and cheaply first though. Always test the market before ploughing all your advertising budget on it. Lastly I would recommend trying at least three different papers with three different ad copies and expand from there as your budget allows. Direct Mailing put yourself in the shoes of your direct mail recipients. Avoid direct mail deadly mistakes or your materials will end up in the trash too. Before you even begin to put your direct mail campaign together, you've got to know who your target market is. Are they women? Parents? Young? Old? Understand what motivates them. What are their likes and dislikes? Write as if you're talking to them. And even use terms these types of people would use. But all the fancy graphics and the most beautifully created sentences in the world won't do you a bit of good if you don't carefully select the people on your mailing list. If you're selling adult diapers, you want to target senior citizens...not 23-year-olds. Tighten your mailing list as much as possible to be sure it's tailored to your needs. It's tough to make people believe they need your product and even harder to convince them they need it now. But if you've researched your list, you have a higher chance of hitting potential customers instead of the trash can. You've made your list and checked it twice, so-to-speak. It's the perfect list. Now it's time to write. Define your objectives before you start writing. Stay focused and hit the points of your objective. If you get off track, your reader is going to stop reading. Spend a lot of time on your headline. Just remember how you feel when reading mail that comes to you. After you read that headline, do you keep reading? The headline can make or break your direct mail campaign. Does price really matter? Not unless you know what you're getting for that price. Hook your reader with all of the product benefits. By the time they get to the end, they should be saying, "I can't live without that!" And then you let them in on the price. Even if the price is extremely low, you have to tell potential customers about the product first. Disclosing this price shouldn't put people into shock. Is your product priced according to the market? If you're selling a new teddy bear, it should be priced within reason. Not many people will pay $90 for a tiny teddy bear, right? Truth is, a lot of direct mail goes unanswered because the products are unreasonably priced. Success! Your potential customer read all the way through your mailing. Now what? Did you tell the reader what you want them to do? You can't sell if you don't tell. Your readers need a call to action. Tell them to send in the card, call you, etc. Then tell them again. Once your direct mail is ready to go, test several smaller mailings before sending out a huge chunk. Test each of these mailings by changing a few items when you send them out. Have two or more sales letters you test against each other. By testing, you will find out which of those mailings are bringing in more responses and - hopefully - more orders. Stick with the clear winners. Remember the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Direct mail is a waste of money for a lot of people. But it doesn't have to be for you. Understanding direct mail deadly mistakes -- and avoiding them -- will lead you to sales success! Flyers The next offline advertising method I am going to talk about in this article is a simple flyer. These are a great way to get your website in front of a wide audience. Make 1000 copies and dedicate yourself to handing out all of them in the next 7 days. Here are just a couple of places to hand these out: around your neighbourhood or a large neighbourhood nearby, place stacks at local restaurants, dry cleaners or other places of business, or go to your local college campuses and find areas you can place your flyers. Novelty advertising There are loads of novelty ways to advertise. Use your imagination and be original. Depending on the product you could have your web address printed on t-shirts and give them away to tourists. If you make them bright enough they will wear them with big smiles on they’re faces all day advertising your website Try printing on mouse mats, pens, balls or any other novelty item. It doesn't even always have to be related to your product to get good results although a related gimmick can work wonders. Million Dollar Bills are another great way to advertise offline. If you haven’t heard about these before you can check them out at "http://www.milliondollarsource.com." These can be used a number of different ways including as an attention getter, door opener, response generator, networking device, or simply to get a smile out of the recipient. I would recommend ordering a minimum of 2000 and handing them out as quickly as possible. You can even hire someone to hand them out for you if you are short on time. As strange as this may sound to some of you this method works great and is worth the cost. Statement inserts Even huge corporation’s send statement inserts. You're going to send a statement to your customers anyway, why not throw in some advertisements for yourself? This can also be done when paying bill, you think all them people sat at there desks all day don't want nothing better from life. You get all the advantages of direct mail without paying extra for a separate mailing. Take a look at these numbers: Complete direct mail packages run between $200 and $600 per thousand. In contrast, statement inserts are only $6 to $15 per thousand. A huge savings for you. You can also use statement inserts to test a new product. If your product doesn't generate much interest, you can easily change your advertising angle. But if you've pumped all your ad dollars into commercials, print ads and a solo direct mail campaign without results, changing direction is much harder and more costly. Now the bad news. You get your statement and there's an insert for a high-ticket item inside. Chances are, you're not going to shell out the big bucks for something knew when you've just received this blow to your billfold in the same envelope. That's why your statement insert should advertise a reasonably priced item. Save your top-dollar items for your high advertising dollars. Those big prices won't pull in a lot of orders off a statement insert. Be sure to watch the weight of your mailing too. You can pack a lot in a 34 cent mailing. But anything over one ounce will cost you more in postage. You should also consider using a large statement insert. Packing your mailing full of smaller inserts may seem more logical but research indicates larger inserts have higher response rates. Three panel is most popular, followed by two panel. If you choose to send out a single panel, pack it with information. Deliver the offer, product, copy and audience to pick up the slack in size and details. Order forms must be easy to fill out as well. Keeping your customers waiting for several months, even weeks will reduce your chances of that customer becoming a repeat buyer. Consider having a customer service department solely devoted to your featured product. If someone doesn't receive their order or has other complaints, you need a staff that will handle those concerns immediately. Handled correctly, a good CSR can turn an irate person into a satisfied customer. And that customer will tell a friend about how you solved their problem. Get the most out of postage rates and your ad dollars with statement inserts. Who knows? Your customers might even start looking forward to receiving your bill! Radio A 30- or 60-second radio spot is quite a bargain. Rates vary depending on your area's population. Even still, you can negotiate a cheaper price and receive a better rate if you buy a bulk amount of commercials. One of the many advantages of radio is that you can target your audience. Specific age groups and lifestyles are all defined by the station's format. Ratings also help determine this information and can help you choose the best station and time slot for your company's commercial. The key components of your radio commercial include your name, address, telephone number and selling message. But be sure to ask listeners to visit your site. Repeat your URL at least twice and, again, tell them what they'll gain by visiting. Television Get ready to shatter the myths about television commercials. You don't have to be a major corporation or have tons of disposable ad dollars to hit the airwaves. Buying airtime on your local television station is actually very affordable. But for an even lower rate, check the cable TV companies in your area. Airtime is significantly lower than broadcast television ad rates. You also have the added benefit of reaching a specific target audience. If you sell sporting goods, your ad can run on SportsSouth and ESPN for the best possible prospects. Your cable operator can even gear the commercials to a zip code or local community. Infomercials aren't too far behind commercials as a low-cost, traffic-building tool. Even a 15-minute infomercial can explain your products/services and promote your Web site at the same time. Just like with print, make sure your URL is prominently displayed in your commercial and/or infomercial. Keep in mind, not everybody has a big screen TV at home and this can make a huge difference to a potential customer with a 19" screen. Conclusion New technology forces us to adapt to new advertising means. But sometimes old school techniques are overlooked when, in fact, they can actually help propel business into the money-making wave of the future. Don't just do it once and be happy with your results, if something works keep repeating it and as you make money put more money into your venture. Best of luck to you all.

If You Build It, They Will Come...

2007-11-11T07:43:00.003-08:00

...No they won't. On the web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of the search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion. Web Directories The basic part of any promotion campaign, web directories, whist they may not generate much in the way of traffic, will help in your site's search engine ranking. A good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories can be found at http://info.vilesilencer.com. Pay Per Click Advertising This is advertising such as PPC Search Engines, like Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, like Google's AdWords. Be warned, it is very easy to go through a substantial amount of money for no reward using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (amongst others) lets you pick a maximum budget a day, but, although $5 may not sound like much, $5/day is $150+ per month. Better make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and, in preference, not highly competed on, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this. Quality Traffic, not Just Traffic It's what everyone is after, more traffic to their website. Traffic is easy to obtain, though. Autosurfers, manual hit exchanges and purchased traffic will all send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will just burn up your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you are receiving decent money for pay per impression advertising, such as banners and popups, this traffic can be totally valueless. Repeat Traffic Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you are selling a one-off product, and your sales copy is fantastic enough that they are hooked to buy on the first visit (and if you are regulary doing this, write an ebook explaining how and sell it), you will want visitors to return. If there is nothing of value at your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own accord. Typically, it is estimated that a prospective customer will be exposed seven times to a product etc. before buying. Reciprocal Linking Whilst somewhat frowned upon, and generally thought to not be as valuable as one-way linking (see below) for search engine optimization, a relevant reciprocal linking campaign can be an important traffic generating tool. swap links with sites in a related, but non-competing, business to your own. It isn't really a good idea to link to competitors; although visitors will be interested in your product, there is a good chance you will lose them to your competitor, especially if their website or product is better or looks better than your own. Not a desirable outcome. For example, a web hosting site could link to a site that sells scripts and programs; visitors to one will more than likely use the other, but the sites are not in direct competition. You can also swap links with web directories that require a reciprocal link. One-Way Linking Considered the best form of link for SEO purposes, this can also be a good source of traffic. There are a number of ways of getting one-way links. The easiest is submission to free web directories (see above). Another good source is by writing articles relevant to your site or industry, putting a resource box at the bottom, then posting the article on the directories such as GoArticles, or by sumbitting to the ezines. Webmasters and ezine publishers are always in need of fresh content, and will publish your article for free. The hardest way of getting one-way inbound links is by having websites voluntarily link to you. The only way to do this is by providing a valuable tool, service or resource that other webmasters will want to direct their visitors to

Advertising Your Work From Home Internet Business With PPC Search Engines.

2007-11-11T07:42:00.005-08:00

If you want to make money online with a work from home business then you are going to need lots of good targeted traffic to your web site and or affiliate links. One way to get good targeted traffic is to pay for it. I know you were hoping to do this business of yours without spending a dime right? Well if that’s what you are thinking you better keep working for someone else and forget about working from home with your own internet business. I have been paying for traffic ever since I started my online business over 4 years ago and one of the best sources of targeted traffic is through pay per click search engines (PPC) or pay for placement search alternatives like Google adwords or Yahoo Sponsor Listings, formerly Overture.com . Google adwords and Yahoo Sponsor Listings are the kings of pay per placement search engines. They are also the most expensive but you will get the most targeted traffic from them. If you cannot get a free listing in the top 10 on their main search results under the sponsored listings then you may want to consider pay per placement. Sponsored listings usually appear at the top above regular listings on Yahoo, and down the right side of the page at Google. If Google and Yahoo are too rich for your liking then try some of the smaller PPC search engines like 7Search, Findwhat and or Kanoodle. I have put together a web page with links to these PPC search engines at the following web page. CLICK HERE-----> http://bigmoolla.com/ppc.html The key to good PPC advertising is to find cheap key words under .50 cents per click that will land you in the top 5 positions. There is no need to be number 1. A number 5 placement may cost you a few cents per click less and you will likely get the same traffic or in some cases even more than a number 1 spot. Try to pick as many key words as you can that are directly related to your product or service. If you are advertising a work from home internet business try breaking down what I just typed. Work from home, home internet business, internet business, work from home business, home business. YOU GET THE PICTURE. If you want to advertise a product like multivitamins try keywords like vitamins, supplements, vitamin supplements, health supplements, diet supplements, multivitamins. YOU GET THE PICTURE. If you don’t have your own web site and only an affiliate link you may have to get a redirect URL from someone like http://tinyurl.com . Most of the PPC engines will not allow you to use an affiliate link. But you can get a tinyurl for free and have it re-direct to your affiliate link. If your affiliate program allows you to key code for testing purposes like SFI does then you can get several tinyurls and direct them to a different key code. That way you can actually test your PPC ad campaign to see which key words are working the best for you. This is important if you want to reduce your advertising dollars without sacrificing traffic to your web site. (We all want to do this right?) PPC is only one advertising method that you should be taking advantage of, but it’s an important one so give it a try if you have not already. It may just change the way you do business and effect how much money you make with your work from home internet business.

The Click Fraud Problem & how to eliminate it.

2007-11-11T07:42:00.003-08:00

Click fraud has become a major problem for online marketers. If you participate on Google adwords campaigns or Overture, you must already pay a lot for your campaigns. What is click fraud? Click fraud is the deliberate clicks to PPC search engine ads for completely other reasons than expressing interest for buying the related products or services. Overture defines click fraud as clicks arising for reasons other than the good-faith intention of an Internet user to visit a web site to purchase goods or services or to obtain information. Google defines click fraud, or invalid clicks, as any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions. In simple words, Click fraud means that someone is cheating you and that you pay too much for your pay per click campaigns. Who is doing that? Three main groups click on pay per click ads, without real interest in the offered goods: People who joined Google AdSense or other per click affiliate programs click on the ads on their own web site to make a little income. Often, these people cooperate with other webmasters to click on each other's ads. Some unethical companies click on the pay per click ads of competitors to drive up their advertising costs. Companies (often in India, Russia and China) hire people who are paid to click on ads. Google and other search networks provide refunds to advertisers when click fraud has been discovered. Google and Overture employ "fraud squads," or teams of people dedicated to fighting click schemes. But at least two marketing executives say such countermeasures are missing fraudulent clicks that are responsible for between 5 percent and 20 percent of advertising fees paid to all search networks. This is a huge problem. There is no “pay per click” Company denying that click fraud exists. Web analytics companies estimates that the 50% of all click activity is fraudulent. This means that your pay per click marketing activities are half effective as they could be because of click fraud. Overture spokeswoman Jennifer Stephens refutes that estimate, saying that the numbers likely represent acts of fraud that are ultimately caught. She added that Overture filters most fraudulent clicks with the best antifraud system in the industry, which combines technology and human analysis. Most advertisers are aware of the click-fraud issue but have not delved into it because of the technical complexities involved. Others are concerned that they could jeopardize their relationships with the powerful search networks if they complain too loudly. One of the best ways to eliminate click fraud is using anti click fraud services such as ppctrax (www.ppctrax.com). They provide services like the below: IP address capture. IP address geographic Location. User Agent (browser, bot etc.) See exactly what keywords are generating your clicks Date and Time stamp System detects sudden click spikes from one or more IP addresses Real-time email alerts at 80% and 100% of your account's transaction utilization IP address history - alert you to prior offenders Another similar service is “who is clicking who”: http://www.whosclickingwho.com Other ways is the click fraud capture software like Click Auditor: http://www.keywordmax.com/click_auditor.html