1. Premeditated Abuse: Repetitive clicking on a competitor's paid link to deplete their marketing budgets and lower rankings.
2. Jamming: Intentional inflation of PPC prices to force a competitor to pay an artificially high cost per click, causing them to exhaust their budgets quickly.
3. Competitive Roadblocks: Use of a competitor’s trademark or brand name, thereby diverting visitors to an alternate web site and offering a competing product or service.
4. Made for AdSense (MFA): Creation of shell sites that display PPC ads, which are then clicked on repeatedly to generate income.
5. Negligence: Perceived or real negligence on the part of PPC providers, allowing above items 1 through 4 – or any combinations of these items – to occur.

Examining the Methods, Motivations, and Preventive Measures

• Placing a budget cap on campaigns assure that questionable patterns are identified and serious damage is avoided.
• Working with an SEM provider who can quickly identify changes in overall campaign performance through active management is very effective.
• If a company is at risk for click fraud, purchasing fraud software or services is a good option. A lower-cost option is a line-by-line scan of web logs for suspicious activity which can then be used as documentation to pursue refunds/credits.
  

• An SEM program built around a bottom-line cost per acquisition is the best preventive measure. This assures that keyword bids are placed based on ultimate value to a company, as opposed to rank – effectively eliminating your ability to be jammed.
• For advertisers in high-risk keyword segments, we recommend purchasing automated, around-the-clock PPC bid management software.
  

• Establish trademarked protection paperwork with Google and Yahoo!. Although this is a long and cumbersome process, it will ultimately stop a competitor from using trademarked terms in ad copy.
• Applying best practices in the construction and execution of an SEM program is often the best defense. This promotes the best possible relevancy and quality ratings from the engines themselves and better placement in search results.
• Many companies are often unaware that competitive roadblocks are being used by their SEM provider. A simple phone call to a counterpart at the “offending” company may prove very effective.
  

4. Made for AdSense (MFA)
Exposure: Low to Medium

Methods and Motivations
An MFA is a shell site, which consists of a few deep pages of content on a single topic. The sole purpose of an MFA is to attract and display high-revenue PPC ads. Inherently, MFAs are not fraudulent. They only become fraudulent when the creator of the MFA clicks on his own ads – or sets up a network of fraudulent clickers – to increase revenue. Because successfully setting up this type of click fraud is highly complex, time consuming, and risky, it is not a common practice. Those industries and advertisers with expensive PPC inventory are the most likely targets for MFA click fraud.

Top-Level Preventive Measures
Same as in other areas.

Specific Preventive Measures

• The best defense is constructing a campaign that focuses on bottom-line business objectives and cost per action.
• Ongoing and active management of metrics will quickly identify anomalies. Additionally, analyzing the performance of an SEM campaign holistically as well as locally (e.g. distribution channel) is also a good defense.
• Since this level of fraud can only occur with content matching, choosing not to advertise on those channels is the ultimate protection. Click fraud protection software and services may be able to detect fraudulent click patterns above and beyond what the search engines provide.
  

I love Gord Hotchkiss – or at least his insights. His recent analogy of online marketing being akin to a Gordian Knot, with search being the glue that binds together each of the intersection points was sheer poetry.

But I was very surprised by his recent article titled “Doing Search Only Counts if You're Seen” – focusing around the Ontario Tourism Bureau's lack of budgetary backing for its Search Engine Marketing (SEM) program and as a result, the scope of their Search program. Talk about missing the point completely!

So why is it that we are berating the Ontario Tourism Bureau for lack their lack of budget commitment to SEM? Do we really believe that by simply pointing out the strong performance of SEM as an online marketing tool that we can change their behavior? And further, do we really believe that because the program is under-funded that somehow that completely negates all the SEM efforts being made, as the headline suggests?

I am going to answer no to those last two questions, and further I would challenge anyone in the SEM community to come forward to say that they have never worked with a company who under funded their SEM programs. Or that they have never worked with a company who short changed their SEM programs in favor of less accountable marketing efforts. I would even go out on a limb to say that most SEM providers have more than a few client companies that fit that category. So by inference, are we as “SEM professionals” failing miserably? I would say yes only to the extent that we as a community tend to expect everyone to “get it” in the same fashion we do. The reality is that a good portion of companies have marketing staff that struggle to even articulate what SEM is, let alone champion moving millions of dollars from their safe, predictable, known marketing channels over the mystery black box of SEM. The challenge is not lack of funding, it is lack of maturity.

I am frustrated as the next person by the ongoing challenges in the SEM space, that on one hand we have “crossed the chasm” yet on the other hand, I can deliver a 25-page in-depth analysis showing SEM as having delivered a 10X return on investment only to have the program canceled (making me as guilty as the next guy for taking a numbers first approach).

What I would really like to hear from the community is not research justifying what we already know – but rather how have each of you have been successful in educating your client companies in the space? Because honestly, if we could just throw a bunch of statistics at someone and have them get it the first, second, third or fifth time – we would all be (SEM) golden children.

Doing good work is great, but being validated and delivering breakthrough performance for a client is even better...and getting recognized for our work on 24 Hour Fitness in the press and an ad:tech nomination is the best. Ingrid Nielsen, our Associate Media Director and Senior Search Strategist has done an amazing job partnering with WebTrends and using their Dynamic Search platform ( formerly Clickshift) to the benefit of most of our search clients. Their product delivers on both of these customer needs:

Campaign Management - The overall platform allows us to manage costs efficiently while delivering a highly optimized search program that meets all of the strategic objectives of the campaign.

Sophisticated Measurement - The standardized and consistent metrics allows our analytics team to focus on analyzing data and delivering true value as opposed to being mired in data from disparate sources.

The net effect makes us more efficient and more successful in our search campaigns and ultimately leads to happy and satisfied clients. And it's nice to be recognized for it too! :)

I saw another post on SEMgeek.com that caught my attention, that declares the impending doom of content match because of its poor performance and because of advertisers wising up to its pitfalls. While I completely agree that content match can be very problematic, at the same time there are plenty of companies and advertisers using content match to effectively drive conversions. Surely content match involves more active management than traditional search and it requires more comprehensive and forward looking setup as well. On the same note, content match will NEVER perform as well as traditional search, but if done well it will drive incremental traffic and conversions. I think it is inherently flawed to even compare the two; it's similar to trying to compared brand oriented TV commercials to DRTV and expect similar CPA results. It will never happen, period!

What content match does do, however, is expand the audience, It increases the reach of any search campaign, so if you've maxed out the reach of your traditional search and you have incremental dollars to drive conversions, then trying content match and measuring it against a different standard can increase your conversion pool. A comparable media is banner ads, and the intent should be thought of similarly as well. You're placing an ad near relevant content and trying to intercept that consumer. You're not serving their express interest in a subject that they were actively seeking, you're trying to take them away from what they were doing and buy your products or download your white paper. Thinking of content match this way illustrates one of the obvious reasons why Google expanded into display ads within the content network that function like content match... and they're showing strong performance and besting traditional display for some efforts.

On the other hand, I do agree that the way content match is handled by Google and Yahoo! is a bit underhanded, and they certainly do a poor job explaining what it is and the efficacy behind it. It is not something that the untrained search novice should try on a whim, it's something that should be strategically approached and cautiously monitored. I also agree that defaulting content match to ON is not exactly consumer friendly, and no doubt scares off many search newbies when their first search campaigns fail and they don't understand why.

The key to search, content match and all other advertising and traffic driving activities is to create a strategy, measure the performance ruthlessly and to optimize the hell out of it. If it doesn't work then don't do it, but never assume a whole category of media like content match is not going to work without testing it.