By Kim Roach (c) 2006

You’ve heard the stories. Clíck fraud has run rampant on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This is evidenced by the numerous law suits that have been filed.
One of the most notable cases occurred this year when Google settled their own clíck fraud case to the tune of 90 million dollars. In fact, Google and Yahoo have each settled a class action lawsuit filed by marketers.

Clíck Fraud - What It Is

So, what is clíck fraud and how does it occur? Wikipedia provides us with a definition:

AdWords Seminars for Success will be presented in six cities during Google’s first round of introducing these one-day training courses aimed at informing entrepreneurs on the benefits of AdWords and its potential rewards.

The jaded observer might be deluded into believing Google gets so much attention, it could not possibly need to go out and promote itself, and certainly not in an offline manner. That is what Google plans to do with the AdWords Seminars, coming soon to four more cities: Chicago, New York City, Miami, and Boston (sessions in Los Angeles and San Mateo were held in late September.)

By John Young (c) 2006

Bill was getting frustrated and desperate. He’d being trying to promote his website for months with little or no success.
Adwords didn’t seem to be working. He’d devised the most fiendish ads he could think of and set them up on Google only to find that nobody clicked on them.

He had written several articles and, using an automatic article submitter, had placed them on hundreds of Article Barns across the web. There had been an increase in his Alexa Ratings, but that was it. Maybe there was a slight flurry of hits when he first placed the article, then nothing.

By Scott Buresh (c) 2006

When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site’s profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it’s usually better to focus on one or the other. But which is best for you?

The Japanese testing of AdWords on mobiles proved successful enough that Google has quietly debuted the service in the US. Do a mobile search using Google and something completely unexpected may appear.

Google has now brought AdWords to mobiles, a move that increases the number of potential outlets for their advertising inventory.

A report on RCRNews.com discussed the change to AdWords that now allows clients to place their ads on wireless devices:

“The Internet giant quietly launched the offering that allows AdWords customers to place marketing messages-including clickable links-in listings retrieved through Google’s mobile search service.

Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, provided answers for some common questions about click fraud after Google disclosed it was nearing a settlement in a lawsuit filed against it over the problem.

For one thing, Google isn’t going to tell how they detect invalid clicks. Ghosemajumder noted in the Q&A posted at the AdWords blog that a lot of smart people developed the methods and technology used in tracking those down. “Doing so would make it easier for fraudsters to try to defeat our systems,” he said.

By Mark Daoust

Starting a website used to be relatively easy. Register a domain name, get a virtual hostïng account, setup a basic looking website, then choose from the literally hundreds of marketing agencies that were willing to send traffïc to your site for a relatively small price. A lot has changed since 1999 on the Internet, and maybe nothing so much as the way we market our websites.
Some may be tempted to say that marketing has become easier in today’s Internet. We know more about user’s expectations and are able to better target our ads to users who are interested in our websites. Through programs such as Google Adsense and Yahoo’s Contextual Marketing programs, we can be relatively certain that the clicks for which we pay are from people who are actually interested in our programs (of course there are issues of click fraud, but that is not the focus of this article).

By Jim Hedger (c) 2005, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.

Google has scored a major coup with the release of Google Analytics. In the spirit of helping webmasters and search marketers move site visitors into converted site users, Google is offering its enormously useful site analytics tool, Urchin, frëe of charge under the re-branded name Google Analytics. The software is designed to help webmasters and marketers understand site visitors and their behaviours. Last year, it cost almost $500/mth to subscribe to.
For Google, search is about business and business is about results. Results are measured in many different ways, depending on the goals of those gauging the yardstick. For Google, the yardstick continues to appear infinite, defying common sense, which logically tells us otherwise. The introduction of Google Analytics solidifies Google’s place as the pinnacle of search advertising providers and is likely to convert a lot of webmasters into Google account holders.

By Merle MCPromotionsPress.com

Have you ever wished for someone to come along and compete with “Google’s Adsense Program”? With the launch of “Yahoo’s Publisher Network”(YPN) you could say that some wishes really do come true.
If you’re not familiar with Adsense or YPN, both programs allow you to add specialized coding to your website pages and then display text-based ads which are related to the content on the page. For example, if you have a sports related website theme, then ads would be shown for sporting goods and services.

By Silvia Hartman for WebProNews

***For this to work, you need some kind of tracking for your website/web pages that tells you which search engines send people to you for what keyword searches. Now truly, for a website owner there is nothing more fascinating than their own stats, so if you don’t have good tracking software yet, do go out and get some.

There are many versions about, still many free ones available, and please, DO get started with tracking your pages and their performance.***

Now, let’s get started.