February 2008

After three weeks and me calling and saying “Hey, remember me?”, Yahoo finally came back with the results of the traffic review. It was the standard boilerplate response of finding no problems with the traffic. Despite providing IP addresses, geo identification, terms, referrers, domain ownership evidence, timestamps and pageviews, Yahoo couldn’t find any issues. Really. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

So anyway… $100 down the drain. But not really, as I made sure to also point this info out to a few respected journalists and executives at click fraud detection businesses.

I’ve been a click fraud hound for many years now.  People that know me closely will tell you that I tend to obsess over this stuff.  Yahoo has been a thorn in my side since I started because their traffic quality plummeted after they lost MSN and started filling in with no-name search partners and parked sites.  Click fraud is actually what first led me to my interest in domains and learning about that whole world.  I learned that not every domain parker is involved in click fraud, but they’re sure getting a black eye from it by not speaking out more against it.  It surprises me that they don’t do more to protect their golden goose.  But I digress…

Last night I set up a new campaign in Yahoo.  First time in a long time because of my bad experiences with them.  But, I figured it would be as bad now that I’m bidding on MUCH less expensive terms.  WRONG-O!  The following is what I learned from a 50 click test.

I loaded thousands of geo-specific terms.  Los Angeles (keyword), Montana (keyword), Tuscaloosa (keyword).  You get the point.  I turned it on around 10:45 PM.  Using Yahoo’s close-to-real-time reporting I watched the clicks adding up.  I was seeing CTR over 75%.  When I got close to 50 clicks, I paused the campaign and went in to my logs to check the clicks.  I took the IP addresses and ran them against a geo-location database.  I wish I could say I was shocked by the results. 

Now, what someone in West Virginia is doing looking for a Chicago (keyword) is beyond me.  Sure, it could happen.  But not 99% of the time like occurs above.  This is one of those things where taken at face value maybe wouldn’t look like bogus traffic.  Yahoo certainly didn’t seem to have a problem with it as they charged me for all of them.

One thing that drives me crazy about industry blogs is that there are so many people saying the exact same thing over and over again.  You can usually find one person will post something of interest and then 100 or so other people who subscribe to that original blog will post pretty much the same thing.  Why??? Why do you do this?  If you follow certain industries, then you have a bunch of industry blogs in your reader.  Inevitably you end up with 101 posts about 1 thing.  It’s just so circular because the people that read the blog with the unoriginal post and just wrote about it on their blog just also saw it on all the other blogs. 

So, industry bloggy blogger guy, if you get the urge to regurge what you’ve read on someone else’s industry blog thinking you’re going to enlighten new people and get credit for being such an original thinker…. just stop.

I try to prevent topic overlap with my blogroll to spare people.  If I catch it happening, I merely pull out the source that seems to be the follower.  My roll changes fairly regularly as I move up the chain to credible forward thinkers.

I try not repost stuff that you can just as easily read somewhere else.  It may result in me not following the ‘post every day’ mantra, but what I do post I try to make original.

Sorry, guess I’m still just grumpy about the Pats.