The Downfall of Google Clicks
Okay, I know the title may scare some of you lemmings that own Google (NASDAQ GOOG) stock. Of course, with the current state of the stock market and where Google shares are currently heading, you guys are probably shaking in your boots already. So, the gloom and doom title of my post may not even get you guys to bat an eye.
Yeah, so, I said it. Google is on its way down, down, down. Why? Simple: click fraud. Yeah, that’s right, the high and mighty Google is getting hit by click fraud over and over and over again. And who does it hurt the most? Google? HELL NO—-Google actually benefits from click fraud! The advertisers are the ultimate losers here, for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, click fraud causes advertisers’ money to go bye-bye. More and more fraudulent clicks will keep dinging your credit cards, and some of you may not even realize it till it happened already. Second, click fraud causes inflated click prices. Some search terms that used to be only a few dollars a click (yowza) are now at $10.00 or MORE! Talk about inflation. Fugget about it. Third, click fraud breeds more click fraud. The more advertisers continue to spend on clicks, not realizing which are fraud and which are real sales leads, the more it breeds affiliates and such to keep the fraud going.
All the while this is happening, Google’s wallet is getting fatter and The Googleplex is getting bigger. Now, you Google stockholders should really be concerned, when the finance people at Google get a real fear in them when they realize the absolute grand scale this is happening, and you will see them have to restate revenue. That will be truly scary. The stock price now may be nice and high, but wait till they have to claim a 33% decrease in profit…The downfall of Google confidence and Google trust is upon us. Solution? One month free advertising for EVERYBODY!
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Comment by Merchant Services Online on 22 January 2008:
Yes Click Fraud is high however I feel that Google has put a good cap on this with the Invalid Clicks reports within the Google Adwords Admin.
If you view this report you will see the report that shows they are working very aggressively on click through tracking as well IP and GEO based evaluation tracking, there are some great articles out there on the web regarding this information.
I do agree with in bad and ugly increase in CPC since it is hard to convert traffic at $25 - $50 per click since most clients are not qualified until they go through the under writing phase, sometimes tracking this even with advanced software can be a pain.
Comment by Minnie29 on 24 January 2008:
What sucks is they claim that clicks are based on volume but my clicks price go up with or without volume.
Comment by NCOT on 24 January 2008:
toast anyway, who cares.
Comment by abomb on 25 January 2008:
Well, I think the people who lost the greatest here are the publishers. Whenever I make a campaign, I ensure that I won’t select the publishers’ network. I love to only advertise on google search results. So, be very careful click frauders, the google adsense might be gone~!!!
Comment by minnesotaman on 25 January 2008:
This doesn’t worry me much, i sold all my google stock which i had held for a long term this december
for a nice profit. Nor do I plan to buy google stock anytime soon :)
Comment by edward haynes on 25 January 2008:
It’s a law of nature. What goes up must come down.
Google has a lot to be worried, i suppose
Comment by Shasha on 25 January 2008:
that is a very bad news. Very Very bad. especially when a large chunk of google paycheck comes from the advertisers’ pocket.
Comment by Robert wilder on 26 January 2008:
I really feel sorry for the publishers and advertisers.
Comment by Mike on 26 January 2008:
Click fraud is bad for Google in the long run too because it drives away advertisers once they realize the clicks aren’t converting. That is just the problem with the ppc method though, I don’t really know how you can ever stop click fraud.
Comment by andrea33 on 27 January 2008:
Click fraud has been a real problem for quite some time now. However, I believe that it is not only the advertisers that feel the negative impact of this, but publishers as well. Many publishers do not condone false clicks, but are penalized if there is question about their clicks, or even banned. I doubt Google is going to be dwindling anytime soon, but there is going to be a lot more competition from other PPC.
Comment by Karen on 29 January 2008:
Its everywhere. The fraud is everywhere. I think Google has to make or increase the Protection level, maybe creating more secured codings or maybe increasing servers… or I don’t know, We can’t just let someone steal our money when we are using it for advertising purpose for as many people as we wanted.
Comment by yiyin on 1 February 2008:
This was bad and its really give an impact to the Google, yes fraud is everywhere and they have to upgrade thier protection to the highest level.
Comment by exculiber on 2 February 2008:
You are probably referring to Google Adwords here. To use this as a marketing tool, one must have to learn its intricacies because it could be costly. But this is an effective way to generate instant traffic from a targetted group.
Comment by Silentleo on 6 February 2008:
i think many people really like to do that that fraud click. nothing we can do about that and i think its also hard for google to avoid that to not happen anymore. Some poeple really smart to hide about that. I hope Google can do something about that soon.
Comment by merahkatak on 6 February 2008:
Some of my friends got banned because of that fraud click. When i ask him if he already click his own click. He swear he never did that. So, i’m not really sure about that. Many poeple said like that because they get banned for unknown reason. When they ask, google not interested to tell us which site have fraud activity. So, nothing my friends can do. He angry and just use others PPC network to continue his work..
So, for advertiser at adword, i believe some of them dissapoint because only got fraud click. The visitor just come to see but not by anything..
Comment by nadzal on 6 February 2008:
I agree about statement about adword. Looks like advertiser money just will go to bye-bye. Most of advertiser loosing their money. I hate its happen. But i need to agree that advertiser need to accept it. If adsense never exist without adword. So, Google need to do something about fraud activity. If not, many advertiser will sad and dissapoint and not use it anymore.
Comment by DayDreamer on 24 February 2008:
Other factor affecting price of google is the MS bid to acquire yahoo. If that succeeds, Google will be facing tougher competition. with increasing fraud clicks, webmasters will migrate to MS+Y!