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I was just reading a post about click fraud at the Young Entrepreneur forums. It mentioned some pretty nasty things your competitors could be doing to you if you use pay per click (PPC) services such as Google Adwords.

Statements like this are an example of a possible method that your competitors could be taking advantage of your PPC advertising budget.

I know of SEO companies who have scripts that will click on their clients competitors Adword ads until the competitors have hit their daily max spending limit. They do this to the ads above their clients ad, and once the competitors maximum spending budget is reached, Google removes the competitors ads, and the clients ad is at the top, and the program stops.

I myself use Google to bring in some traffic but I’ve never given too much thought to fraud since I hoped (perhaps naively) that Google and the other PPC providers kept on top of fraudsters. They say (that’s the word on the street, dawg) that Google has some fairly sound technology behind their programs which offer good protection.

The key thing is to be smart when using PPC. You need to be tracking your campaigns and monitoring results carefully. You should notice some indicators fairly quickly if you are a victim of fraud. You can’t just turn Google PPC on, throw some money at it and hope that you get more sales as a result. It takes time and maybe you should even consider hiring an expert or having a dedicated staff member manage your campaign, especially if you don’t know your CTs from your CT%.

If you can’t afford to hire specialists and don’t have the staff to do it for you, then do like most of us small business folk do, get educated so you can maintain your own campaign. A good place to start is the Google Adwords FAQ. You might also try third party sites such as Pay Per Click Universe.

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager