Search-engine marketing solves a basic need of connecting potential buyers to sellers, but until recently, it has lived a low-profile life in the media and advertising world.
Statistics
1.About 80% of internet traffic begins at a search engine, according to Harris Interactive,
2.DoubleClick reports 41% of web users use search for simple navigation, typing a query to find a brand rather than typing a URL directly into their browser
3. Search Engine Marketers Spent $5.75 Billion in 2005, According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)
4.The latest figures from Forrester indicate search marketing will be a $7 billion business this year.
The rise of search engine marketing has seen a rise in frauds. We have mentioned some of these latest threats.
Network Click Fraud
Network click fraud occurs when a syndication partner (a smaller publisher or search engine) that receives and displays paid placement or contextual results from a search network engages in the manufacture, creation, or misrepresentation of clicks delivered to its network partner.
When a network partner manufactures clicks, either through human or robotic means, that traffic is of much lower quality than pure traffic generated through user searches. Adding this useless traffic to the network initially seems to benefit the network owner (often a search engine itself). After all, the network owner shares click revenue with the publisher.
But the network owner must also worry about network quality. Most marketers measure their traffic quality and make campaign mix and bid changes based on empirical conversion or other quality measurement data (whether automatically, manually, or both). As the network’s volume of subpar traffic increases for any specific market segment, click prices drop. The remaining publishers in the network are hurt.
Competitive Click Fraud
Competitive click fraud is a big problem for smaller businesses, particularly when the service provided is of great value (or great lifetime value), resulting in high CPCs (define). Lawyers, doctors, accountants, IT consultants, and, of course, search engine marketing (SEM)/SEO (define) firms all bid in high CPC marketplaces. The higher the CPC, the greater the effect a competitor can have on a specific budget.
Terms such as “new york lawyer” exceed $10 CPC. If a listing gets a click a day from five people from a competitor in both Google and Overture, you’ll pay an extra $1,500 a month each to those search engines. This is a serious additional cost — with absolutely no benefit.
Mislabeled Traffic
Mislabeled traffic is more a network issue. It isn’t about malicious activity so much as crossed lines between search and contextual traffic. Visit a news sites and look for text links. Some of those links are reported as search when actually, they’re contextual.
What’s the difference? Some marketers want to provide a different message to active searchers than to visitors who happen on the ad. Some ads served against some content aren’t even contextual. I see many “debt consolidation” and “bankruptcy” ads running on general news pages. Sure, the CPCs and CPM (define) are high for the publisher, but does the marketer get what he pays for?
Impression Fraud
Impression fraud is the newest threat. Google and other engines rely on an AdRank method of determining an ad’s relevance. A competitor pauses his campaign while a sudden fraudulent surge in impressions on your keywords occurs. All these impressions occur with zero clicks. AdRanks for competing ads, including yours, drop through the floor. The competitor waits a bit, then swoops in with a normal ad with a high CTR. Your campaign is entrenched with keywords that are disabled or seriously crippled. So, Google makes an ad position decision based on fake data.
In the end, search traffic, and search engine marketers’ success, search engines, and the industry as a whole rely on correctly labeled traffic coming from high-quality network partners (or inexpensive, lower-quality networks). All these players have a vested interest in SEM’s success, except cheaters. Let’s make sure the cheaters don’t win in the long term.
Source::
http://www.sempo.org/news/releases/Search_Engine_Marketers
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3483981