If you want an interesting statistic, here is what the largest advertisers paid Google in June 2010 for ad clicks:
This is according to Business Insider
Marketers like pay per click because – at least – someone is clicking a link. Now we know there can be lots of fraud, but at least it is measurable.
What’s less measurable (till now) are the elusive ad impressions.
Just because your site gets a million visitors doesn’t mean advertisers are having their ads seen a million times.
DoubleVerify.com is a service that large advertisers use to make sure their ads are being displayed as often as they are paying for them to be displayed. They say:
We verify more than 35 billion ad impressions across the globe monthly. More than 100 Fortune 500 companies depend on DoubleVerify’s technology and expertise to ensure the ads they’ve purchased are delivered and displayed accurately.
All sorts of large advertisers use them. I didn’t see any logo’s for “Joe Blow’s work at home business” but maybe I didn’t see them all! That makes sense… work at home people don’t normally spend great amounts of advertising unless they have found one wildly profitable key niche where profit margins are enough to make it worthwhile.
(Even then Google may close it down… they are pretty high and mighty at times about what they allow to run. One contact of mine got his ezine sign up page shut down because it was “collecting information”… duh!)
But back to the point in all this.
If they “big guys” are paying for “ad impressions” to be policed, how are you protecting yourself?
One way to do this is to include an image hosted on your website.
If your image http://yourdomain.com/images/adimage.gif shows up in your stats as displaying 1,000 times last week, you can ask why you’re being billed for 10,000 impressions?
Lots of affiliate links from Commission Junction, Ebay,com and Amazon.com have these hidden images as well, but you can and probably should do it with YOUR own hosted images. Obviously have even the same image renamed for every new campaign (same picture, new name).
Most work at home business people are trying to generate organic search engine traffic or other methods that don’t cost so much.
Here is a program I intend to check out soon that promises that. Unlike a “traffic product” I exposed as inappropriate for most work at home people, this seems better, though I’m still waiting to review it: Auto Traffic Avalance (affiliate link) -If it really takes just $14 to get started, we may have a winner with it!
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