Pay Per Click listings showing up on strange sights. Why?

[tomhouy]

We have a live chat script on our site, which also happens to gather statistics about the traffic coming to our site, such as the referring url.

We are getting a lot of click throughs from some really suspicious looking "Search Engines" like www.thesearcherz.com, www.omegasearch.net, and www.pay-per-click.ws.

These sights are displaying paid listings of ours. Could anyone enlighten me on why there are so many of these types of search engines out there? Are they bogus sites being used to milk an advertisers Pay Per Click funds or what?

[smakyyy]

what is your URL - regarding the paid listings-- who do you advertise with? is it with google adsense program or some other?

[LindaW]

Last Wednesday and Thursday I had the same thing happen on my site. I had over 100 visits per day from these "odd" search sites. The hit rate was unusually high and generally the visitor went to my home page and no more. My site link on these sites were from my LookSmart listing. All I know is that it maxed out my monthly budget on LookSmart.

[geoffreygag]

Looksmart listngs. I had a campaign at Looksmart. Word for word listings were spread across some Tier 3 and Tier 4 search sites

[murcoweb]

I signed up with a $5 bonus from an affiliate program at Kanoodle.com yesterday. I have been receiving hits from search engines like those too.



-Matt
______________________
www.templatedaddy.com
www.murcoweb.com

[kjohnson5576]

I question I'd like answered is: did sales increase? or was it just traffic?

[gmartfin]

And maybe just maybe you all went back and checked out their pages which is what they really want.

[LindaW]

In my case none of these resulted in a sale they were empty hits. Like I said earlier they only hit my home page. Normally, I see visits from the inclusion ads viewing more than one page. I did go check a out a couple of them that I was getting the most hits from, and maybe that is what they wanted. I thought it funny though, because I don't normally get many hits from my LookSmart Listings and even fewer since MSN dropped the service. Then all of a sudden I am flooded with them to the point it maxed out my monthly budget.

[bjbtexas]

I got 515 hits for my $50 minimum account at Kanoodle from http://www.topwanted.net/, plus some miscellaneous other useless sites.

[agotoguy]

The question is - did you write to Kanoodle and check if you were actually charged for those clicks. Their interface for clickthroughs shows only "charged" and "uncharged" clicks. All of the hits from that site could well be "uncharged". I would check with them for clarification. When I did this once they supplied me with a very valid explanation.

[tomhouy]

Ok, since I initially posted this, I signed up for a PPC monitoring service, WhosClickingWho, and updated all of our URLs in our various search engine PPC campaigns to include a tracking tag.

The worst offender by far is Enhance, formerly Ah-Ha. 7Search and Xuppa also seem to be providing alot of junk traffic. Findwhat would be in third place for sending bogus clicks.

After reviewing a few days worth of tracking, practically all the above listed PPC services are providing our ads on really low end search engines.

There is no way in hell the general public is finding these cheap search engines and coming to our site thousands of times per day through them.

Some of these sites even make mention of getting paid to click ads. It almost seems like these mini engines are getting a cut of the PPC fees that advertisers pay, in exchange for providing their results.

It's also becoming increasingly obvious that the folks running these search engines are somehow automating the process of searching for high paying terms and automatically clicking the results.

[tomhouy]

To answer a few other questions on this thread. I wrote to all the search engines we have PPC campaigns with, and some, such as Kanoodle, pointed out that we are not necessarily being charged for every click delivered to us through them. A few of them gave us an arbitrary credit ranging from 10 dollars to 150 dollars.

When we get these floods of bogus traffic, our sales hardly increase, but the money we deposit into each account vanishes in less than a day.

We are using Findwhat, Overture, Google, Looksmart, Xuppa, Mamma, TowerSearch, Kanoodle, Lycos Insite, 7Search, ePilot, and Enhance.

Kanoodle has provided us with a good amount of targeted traffic and increased sales for the most part, as does Lycos Insite.

We recently signed up with Enhance, since they were touting their very low click through rates when compared to other search engines, however our daily costs with them have practically exceeded some of our other PPC campaigns because they send so many junk clicks.

As part of WhosClickingWho's service, they give you a script that you can add to your site. When someone visits your site more than 5 times through a PPC ad from the same IP address, it will pop up a warning message to them notifying them that they are being tracked and logged. They also provide you with a relatively detailed report of potential fraudulent clicks coming to you, that you can forward over to the search engines as proof when filing a complaint. The report is a bit sluggish and hard to read as it expands well beyond the screen forcing you to scroll both ways, but it is useful.

Between joining this service and firing off nasty letters to all the current PPC advertisers we use, I have noticed a decent reduction.

[TrafficProducer]

Some Tier 2, 3 and Tier 4 search sites.

Yes, a number of PPC engines will feed your PPC data to other search engines.

The more you pay the more likely they are to do this.

Check out the Partner links of the PPC you are using.

The PPC engine should make it clear where Traffic is going to come from.

Is this good Traffic or Bad? I believe most is genuine, read people but how good it is* I don't know.

* Return On Investment.

[smakyyy]

it seems like they are just going after your ad budget- fake click thru's with no real people coming to your site to purchase- try google for ad's next time - they are honest.