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When you review the performance of your ad campaign with another company, how do you really know that you received the traffic that your stats (or theirs) say you did? In this article, we are going to look at purposeful and inadvertent situations in which you may be getting decieved.
Problem #1 - Fake Clicks
The most serious situation would be a case where a company is knowlingly inflating your clickthroughs. There is software available for free that can be used to automatically "click" on your banner and utilizes proxy servers (usually anonymous) as the referrer. There are thousands of proxy servers that can be used to do this and many web sites that provide lists of these servers. In this scenario, it likely would not matter whether you were using their statistics or your own. There would be fake clicks showing up in both locations and you would likely not know the difference.
Solution
You have to consider the type of advertising being run. Standard banner ads do not perform all that well these days and some estimate that the industry average clickthrough ratio for the year 2000 was about 0.35%. The best performing banner that we have ever run generated 3.9%. If you are getting an 8% clickthrough ratio, for example, you may have reason for suspicion. Remember that popups and rich media will tend to garner much higher clickthrough ratios (this is why they are getting so popular). Below is a list of things that you can do to find out if you are being cheated.
The best thing you can do is to only advertise on reputable web sites. If a web site owner is willing to publish braindumps or other materials that allow people to cheat on their certification exams, why wouldn't they be willing to cheat you as well. Find web sites that demonstrate strong business ethics and morals. They may be more expensive, but you will almost always get what you pay for.
Track your sales for individual ad campaigns. There are a number of ways to do this - consult your technical staff for more information. In the end, your advertising efforts are geared to increase your revenue which makes clickthroughs only a partial measure of the success of your campaign. If a site is sending you higher clickthroughs that are generating fewer sales than other companies that you advertise with, then you may have a problem.
Tracking your own stats for your ad campaign will offer better information as to where your visitors are coming from. Save these stats on a weekly or monthly basis so that you can access them later. Analyze these stats looking for duplicate referring IP addresses or host names. If they are using proxies to increase your hits, they may have a fairly short list of working proxy servers and you may see duplications. If an IP address shows up more than once, it may not be a problem, however, if many IP addresses are showing up many times, then you may have reason for concern. If you are unsure of how to do this on your own, get technical help in your organization to help you analyze your statistics.
Problem #2 - Misconfigured Software
Most banner rotation software has options that determine how it counts pageviews and clickthroughs and the default settings after installation aren't always the best ones for advertisers. Lets look at a few examples of these settings and what they mean to you.
If you were to click on your banner every 5 seconds for a minute, would the publisher's statistics register 12 clickthroughs even though it was the same person? We use Web Adverts software for our banner rotation and by default, there is no time setting between registration of clickthroughs. We changed this to 5 minutes so that if a person clicks on a banner more than once in a 5 minute period, it will only register 1 clickthrough in our stats.
By default, our software will count all of our pageviews that are generated while we are working on the web site as pageviews for your ad. We changed this and banned our IP address range from being counted as pageviews.
Is the publishers advertising software able and configured to prevent pageviews from search engine spiders? Search engine spiders will crawl an entire site and would generate hundreds or even thousands of pageviews and clickthroughs for advertiser's banners as they do their thing. The problem with this is that you may be paying for those pageviews while not getting an inflated clickthrough count. Web Adverts is configured to prevent these hits from being counted in an effort to only deliver quality impressions.
Solution
Before advertising on a web site, ask the publisher how the previously mentioned settings are configured on their site. If they do not know, you might have a reason for concern.
Tracking your own statistics probably won't help you much with pageviews, but will help you determine if the clickthroughs are from spiders or multiple clicks from the same person.
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