PPC Advertising: Click Fraud, Impression Fraud, and Search Term Abuse

[mandy]

Impression Fraud: This type of fraud comes from a competitor or someone marketing on its behalf. Almost all of the quality search engines use algorithms to present ads. Simplified dramatically, a good explanation is that your bid and your ad click rate determine presentation order. It is not a mere coincidence that this approach generates maximum revenue for the search engine. Your competitors can drive down your ad popularity (click rate) by generating a huge volume of automated searches for your key terms but never clicking on your ad. This drops your popularity, which allows your competitor to bid lower but get a higher ad ranking because you competitor disabled his/her own ads when running the “impression attack.” Don’t think, however, that you can necessarily figure out who is doing this by finding the competitor whose ads have been disabled. Affiliate marketers will run these attacks against you, other competitors and even their own client...

full article: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articl...vertising/