Group in Little Rock Challenges Google On Click Fraud

A group of 51 people, mainly small business owners, are trying to get Google to pony up more money to reimburse them for alleged click fraud activities. Their objections revolve around Google’s policy for business owners to prove they are victims of click fraud.

Fifty-one plaintiffs have raised objections, mostly smaller advertisers who say the deal unfairly shifts to them the burden of proving their losses and that they don’t have the resources to easily pursue their claims.”I am a small Google advertiser and a believer that I have been forced by Google to pay for bogus clicks to my site I manage for my consulting clients. The proposed settlement fails to address our damages and the damages of those in my situation,” Galen Workman of Ozdachs Consulting in San Francisco wrote to the court.

I can’t see how this argument can possibly fly in court. How can you sue for damages if you can’t even prove that you’ve been hurt? They just have a “feeling” that they are victims?

Give me a break. As with any advertising, you need to have metrics in place to determine whether your campaign is successful. If no one is converting, perhaps there’s something wrong with your website – like people don’t find your offer compelling or your text is full of jargon .It doesn’t take that much effort to put analytics in place to monitor click activity. If they don’t want to put in the effort to manage their search marketing campaigns, then they should either outsource it or stop whining.

From a different perspective, we’re talking maybe 10-15% of fraudulent clicks. Contrast that with any other form of offline advertising like mailings – where a certain percentage of your list will be invalid names/addresses (people move, merge with other companies, close up shop or even die). Or advertising, where you have no idea how many people even look at your ad. Perhaps that 10-15% is just the cost of advertising in any medium. And given that it means that 85-90% of your visitors are targeted, that’s not bad.

Along with their pay-per-click services, Google provides fairly extensive reporting tools so you know how many people click on your ad and how many people convert (just copy-and-paste their code into your site). For those that want more, they’ve released new analytics tools like a “site overlay” which shows how many people clicked on each internal link on your website and a “marketing summary” showing your top 5 sources for traffic and what percentage of each are converting.

Google also has a sitemaps feature where you install a snippet of code and google tells you the keywords people are using to find your site and your average position in Google for each keyword.

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