Cheated by PPC?

Today I want to share with you how you would know whether your Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads really justify your spending. I have personally tried few PPC Ads from several ad companies and what I can say is, be careful and be smart in spending your money. There are agencies which their PPC performance are questionable.

To check whether your PPC Ad do gives a good justification for your investment, you need to make sure that the number of clicks generated from your ads should always be either the same or nearly to the number of unique user coming to your site. It should not be too much difference.

If it’s too much different in the sense that the number of unique visitors is much lesser then the number of clicks, there are few possibilities that might actually had happened:

1) Your ad has been clicked by a same person several times. This is not good.

2) Your ad has been clicked by several people within the same origin / location / place such as in a same Internet-cafe, office or computer lab. Doesn’t seams logic if it’s to many clicks right..

In both cases it’s clearly seen as a click fraud and you should complain to your ad agency or stop using their service. You do not want blind traffics but a good quality visitors.

I was in fact been cheated twice. One of it is when I was promoting my post on “Build Your Online Education Business”. The PPC Ad report shows that I have received 337 clicks but from my Google Analytic it shows only 152 unique visitors to that particular post.

So now how can you check this by your own? Just use this steps:

1) Identify a page in your site that you need to promote. I should suggest promoting a new page that you have just posted. Don’t use any other method of promoting except the PPC Ad that you’re planning to use. Don’t promote your main page as this will make it difficult for you to differentiate the coming sources.

2) Install a web traffic analyzer on your site. This is to ensure that you could capture the activities of your visitors, including but not limited to the origin of visit, duration per visit, referral site, time of visit and number of unique visitors per page. There are lots of providers offering free service out there. You can check from Google search. Alternatively you can also use Google Analytics. In fact I use two, Analytics and Histats.com, for a better comparison.

3) Choose PPC Ad which provides you with a detail report and buy the lowest PPC cost possible. Run your ad within a week or within a smaller budget range, say $20. Once your campaign ends, stop advertising, start analyzing and decide wisely.

Hope that helps..

Azlan Hussain lives in Kuala Lumpur and runs his home-based business full-time. He is also the publisher of http://www.azlanhussain.com, Online Business with a kampung boy, an online guide for building business online. With his background in interactive media, advertising & online marketing, his ideas and experience will be a useful thing to learn from.