How can one combat click fraud when running PPC campaigns? How can you minimize the chance of being targeted? And how can you find out if you have already been paying for fraudulent clicks?

Suspecting we had been a victim of click fraud ourselves, we set out to answer these questions and share our findings.

In addition to documenting our own experience, we have spoken with other PPC experts around the world and developed a 10-point plan.

We’ll be sharing the plan during our next teleconference call on Wednesday, March 29th at 4:00pm EST. As always, participation is free. But we do ask that you register ahead of time, so we know how many call lines to reserve.

This plan not only gives you the means to minimize the likelihood of your company becoming a victim of click fraud, but also provides instructions on identifying click fraud attacks as and when they occur.

PPC is an important and sometimes essential tool for many online marketers. As awareness of click fraud grows, it is necessary to learn how to protect both the integrity and the ROI of your campaigns.

In today’s Washington Post there is another article on click fraud, pointing to both Google and Yahoo!

This quote gets to the heart of it:

”After analyzing where and when each click came from, auditing firm ClickFacts Inc. estimated that 35 percent of the referrals that Radiator paid Google for stemmed from bogus traffic. Likewise, 17 percent of the leads that came from Yahoo search results were illegitimate.”

At a time when Google is trying to reassure us that everything is fine, it’s troubling to see such high figures being unearthed.

Interestingly, the 35% figure from ClickFacts ties very closely with the figure of 30% we published in our own click fraud research a little while ago.

If the figures really are that high, industry-wide, the implications for Google, advertisers and publishers alike don’t make for a very happy picture.

Each time we complete a teleconference we feel a little nervous, not knowing how our presentation has been received. So from time to time we ask our listeners to let us know how we did. Without some feedback, we feel we are flying blind. We are happy to receive all feedback, good and critical.

Happily, the feedback from yesterday’s call was all positive.

Here are a few examples from the emails we received.

"Thanks for a great call. I have a suggestion for a call #2: real- world examples of improving and tightening value propositions. It would be really helpful for me to see you take some of those examples from your index card study, or even from real companies that have done a turnaround from a bad value prop to a good one (or vice versa)."

"Terrific conference call today! I gained a lot of valuable insight from it that I can take back to my clients. What I really love is that you have tools that you can apply to gain a practical measurement of the success of a company, based on its value proposition. I will definitely listen to it again and review the notes. I have become a "fan" a plan to sign up for future calls based on this one."

"Today’s seminar was very helpful and has stimulated my thinking about the value proposition of my business. Using the text for a Google ad as a way to force you to pin that proposition down in as few words as possible was very useful. I believe the most important aspect of the seminar is that thinking in terms of a value proposition, rather than making claims such as “the biggest” “best, etc., force me to think of what the raison d’etre of my site really is."

"Thank you so much for the thoughtful and well-conceived presentation on the value proposition. Helpful in every way. Bravo! Look forward to the next time."

If you are not yet on our list and want to receive an invitation to attend our next teleconference, simply sign up here. It’s free.