Imagine a world in Google Adwords advertising where every dollar we invested in a campaign gave us return on that dollar.
Can you envision it?
Now wake up because you and I both know it doesn't exist. In this episode of Yokel Local tips, I talk about how you should think about Google PPC click fraud in a way that you may find shocking.
Here's the background still. You can tell I sat down at an unplanned time to get this recorded. Sometimes, you just have to get something off your chest. This was one of those times.
Video transcription
Hi, Darrell Evans here with Yokel Local Internet Marketing. In today's video, I want to spend just a couple minutes talking about Google pay-per-click fraud or Google PPC fraud.
However, I'm going to shock you in the way I am going to approach this. I want to make sure you're not thinking about Google PPC fraud in the wrong way.
Recently, in a business consultation with a business owner, the first thing they said to me when we we were talking about driving paid traffic was "I don't want to do Google pay-per-click because all that's going to happen is my competitors are going to click on my ads and cost me a bunch of money." I'm going to take that and just deal with that for a second.
- Is it possible that your competitor can click on your ad? The answer is yes.
- Is it possible that there could be other forms of PPC fraud such as Googlebots or not Googlebots, but robots that your competitor can mechanically click on your ad from various IP addresses? The answer is yes.
- Does Google admit to pay-per-click fraud where there are some miscellaneous clicks that seem like they were outside of the scope of what you were targeting and miscellaneous things that just seem to go unexplained? The answer is yes.
But I will say this.
If you think that Google PPC fraud is the reason you shouldn't be using Google paid traffic to drive visitors that are targeted to your site to convert them to customers, you're thinking about it the wrong way.
So I want to spend a minute and talk to you about the mindset you should have when you're using Google pay-per-click and how you can sort of buffer some of these "fraud attacks" if you will, even if it's your competitor, which I doubt.
By the way, your competitor doesn't have time all day to be sitting around checking out your ad and trying to put you down if you are a small business owner. I mean, let's deal with that.
Your mindset is stuck on the wrong thing. Your mindset should be on:
- How do I position my ad groups appropriately?
- How do I find the right keywords to bid on?
- How do I set up the proper landing pages on my website so that when Google shows my ad to that specific visitor that they have a message match with the keyword that they typed in, or phrase that they typed in, with what they can identify on my website which links those two together so that they stick around?
- How do I make sure that my user experience on my website is what it should be so that when they leave Google and come to my website that they don't immediately bounce back to search again because this particular page didn't satisfy them?
What you should be doing is tracking all the way down to the core that visitor who left Google, came to your site and what they actually did from that specific IP address in terms of user engagement, visitor engagement as we call it, all the way through the entire buying funnel.
Now, if you are a small business owner and I've just confused you or made this very, very complicated, please understand that this is how professional marketing is done.
Is there some pay-per-click fraud? Yes, there is but you can't focus on that aspect of it.
Look, let's take it out of Google pay-per-click for just a moment. If you are doing any SEO, there is a thing in SEO called negative keyword SEO where someone can point bad links to your website and try to take down your website. Look, it doesn't matter that it exists. It is concerning.
Google's smart enough to try to deal with it. Yes, they have their own mechanisms. Yes, they're the behemoth of a company but:
- Will they tell you?
- Will they stop it?
- Will they do all the things they can to prevent click fraud?
But the point of the matter is that execution has to be in place. Proper strategy and execution has to be in place to do the best you can to prevent it.
I'm going to end this video with a sports analogy.
I grew up playing football and basketball and baseball. So let me give you a football analogy.
In a football game, is it possible for a referee to miss a call and for your team to suffer an adverse consequence?
That adverse consequence is you can get penalized. You could have fumbled on the play and turned the ball over. For heaven's sake, you could have lost the game based on that missed call. Anything in life has risks. Everything you do, from walking down the street, you could twist your ankle and break your leg from just stepping off of a curve.
So if you're in digital marketing, there are risks. Of course there are.
What I'm saying to you and sharing with you and encouraging you to think about is to shift your mindset away from the negative and into what you can control.
What you can control is how you properly set up your ad groups, how you properly set up your keyword structures, how you properly set up your pages and your user experience for your customer on your website. If you're monitoring that closely or you're working with a company like us that monitors that closely, we would be able to spot that particular pay-per-click fraud without any problem.
Then we can report it to Google. We can take the measures necessary. We can stop a campaign. We can do what we can to do what we can control.
So, I hope this message is helpful.
This really is a mindset issue.
But if you think Google pay-per-click doesn't work and your business needs traffic to its website, you need to be working with a qualified expert or you need to seek the proper information and training so that you can do it yourself. And fortunately at our company, we offer both.
I am not suggesting that you have to work with us but if you'd like more information, feel free to visit us at YokelLocal.com and we'll be happy to either provide you the training information and expertise to be able to provide you the execution of working together as a partner with you.
Hope you are having a great day.
Need help?
Additional Resources
Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center - http://www.google.com/ads/adtrafficquality/
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