The AWS Blog

Is PPC the victim of sensationalized news? Maybe.

This happens to me once at the beginning of every winter: my alarm goes off at 5am, I turn it off and turn on the TV, and the coverage is completely focused on the Winter Blast that has hit Detroit overnight. Reporters are on-scene at various points around the city reporting live about terrible conditions, and the traffic girl is warning me to take my time getting to work. I back out of my garage white-knuckling the steering wheel and bracing myself for 5′ drifts and black ice, but there isn’t any of that. The roads are slightly wet, and traffic is moving at a steady pace.

I don’t blame them. After all, they can’t just sit there … they need something to talk about. But this time around I feel that the web marketing industry might be somewhat of a victim of that same sensationalizing.

My business partner walked into my office yesterday evening clutching this week’s edition of Crain’s Detroit Business, and said, “you’ve gotta read this!”  I saw the front page article that he was referring to, titled Costly Clicks, and told him that I had already read it online, and I was in the process of emailing the author.

The article starts off:

When David Zoldowski checked the numbers on his Yahoo search engine advertising account one morning this past June, he was stunned.

In seven days, he’d been charged $8,500, including a stretch that saw him billed $100 every three minutes. It shouldn’t have been more than $70 a week.

Zoldowski owns Brighton-based Auto One Inc., an automotive glass and accessories chain with 12 locations in the Detroit area. His account with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc.’s Search Marketing division, which is responsible for those “sponsored links” that show up alongside search results, was supposed to be limited to $10 a day each month.

Zoldowski was a victim of a phenomenon called click fraud, the bane of the pay-per-click advertising that accounts for almost all the revenue of search engines such as Yahoo and Mountain View Calif.-based Google Inc., which this past summer announced it’s moving its pay-per-click operations, AdWords, to Ann Arbor and will hire up to 1,000 people there over the next five years.

My first reaction is that David isn’t a victim of click-fraud, he’s a victim of a mis-configured Yahoo PPC Campaign, and a software problem in Yahoo’s ad serving system.

I emailed Bill Shea, the author, with my concerns, and he replied incredibly promptly (I’m assuming that mine wasn’t the first email that he had received). He explained that the click-fraud conclusion was drawn because of the “stretch that saw him [David] billed $100 every three minutes” from overseas traffic. I’d easily argue that geo-targeting (a feature new to Yahoo Search Marketing) and a call to Yahoo about the charges would have solved David’s problem.

Bill balances the article out at the end by interviewing some local PPC companies that do their best to paint click-fraud in an accurate light; as an issue that is manageable, and is not something that should keep a company from exploring PPC as an advertising model.

The positive part of the article is that, in conclusion, David Zoldowski is now working with a search firm to manage his PPC campaigns. I’m sure they’ll be able to limit his click-fraud risk, and show him some good returns.

So maybe comparing the article to the overblown TV weather coverage is unfair, but I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that the only mainstream news coverage that Web Marketing gets is negative at this point, when in reality, web marketing can have an incredible positive impact on a business.

After reading the article, I can’t help myself. I’m going to have to challenge Bill to write an article about one of our many customer success stories related to web marketing … or at least put together a nice follow-up article when David starts seeing some positive results!

Be sure to read the full article on CrainsDetroit.com.

POSTSCRIPT:  My suggestion for an article highlighting the positive impacts of PPC and Web Marketing was denied (got the obligatory: I’ll keep it in mind reply).   What a shame.  One day the traditional media people will begin to understand the impact that the web is having on business