PPC-The Desire for An Exact Bid Amount

If you run PPC campaigns, you are undoubtedly aware of the changes made over at Yahoo to the old Overture platform. Range bid pricing is in. Gee, I wonder where they got the idea.

Pay-per-click marketing tends to be a love it or hate it platform. On the love it side, the platform is a way to generate traffic to a site immediately. This, of course, allows you to first figure out if anyone is interested in what you are selling and then figure out if your site can convert their interest into revenues.

On the downside, it costs money per click, which means you need to keep an eye on whether you are spending more than you make. Then there is the issue of click fraud. Nobody really knows how bad a problem it is, but most people agree it IS a problem. The people at Google and Yahoo deny this, but who really believes them considering they make money on the fraud?

One of the interesting things about PPC is the bidding process. In the old days, GoTo was the big boy on the market. It later became Overture, which was purchased by Yahoo. The system was great. You could bid an exact amount for placement on the engine. This, in turn, made it easy to figure out where your ads would be placed, how much the cost would be and so on.

Then along came Adwords from our friends at Google. Suddenly, you were bidding by range instead of a specific amount. Nobody was really sure where the ads were going to appear, but most people trusted Google at that time and click fraud had not reared its ugly head to any great extent. Ah, but that was then and this is now.

Click fraud is garnering more and more attention on a weekly basis. Just how many of the clicks are legitimate and how many are fakes? Some estimate twenty percent. Some believe the figure is higher while others believe it is lower. The point is nobody really knows. Regardless, the PPC platforms have received a ton of criticism and rightly so in my opinion.

Facing up to the criticism, Google and Yahoo/Overture promised to institute click fraud prevention strategies. Supposedly this has happened. At the same time, however, both maintain the range bidding process. There is nothing wrong with it per se, but it hardly brings more exacting information to the PPC process.

If click fraud is not an issue as claimed by Google and Yahoo, why do they continue to evolve their systems towards providing less specific information? Could they be hiding something? Perhaps making it near impossible for any lawyers or the Justice Department to decipher what is going on?

Beats me. With all the criticism, one would expect them to provide more detailed information and provide proof of the steps they are taking to prevent click fraud. If anything, they are doing just the opposite. At least that is my opinion.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.MarketingTitan.com - an online marketing service.

Using a Cooking Scale
Cooking can be a lot of fun, if you have the right tools. A cooking scale is a device that is not used all the time but which can come in very handy at the right times. A lot of people know that you should use a cooking scale mostly when you are baking, and they work better in a lot of situations than measuring cups.One of the main reasons you want...

AdWord Secrets
Ok, most people know what AdWords is. If not it is the name that Google uses for their PPC (Pay Per Click) system. People all over the world are making very good money from using AdWords. However, alot more are losing alot more money because alot of people do not now how to use PPC or AdWords properly. Here are a few tips to get your AdWords campai...

It is Human Nature to Propagate
Many believe that it is human nature to make up stories, embellish and tell tall tales. Indeed it appears that these folks who say this are right, it must be human nature, because it is getting harder and harder to get a straight answer out of people? Maybe it is all this political correctness that people have just given up on the truth, instead a ...

Google Adwords - Manipulating Keywords For Success
As you probably know, Google Adwords is a pay-per-click solution offered by Google. As with other PPCs, you are given the ability to place your small advertisement on various platforms controlled by Google. While the platform provides you with a large audience, you must manipulate your keywords to generate success.Matching OptionsWhen running an Ad...

Top 3 Reasons Why You Need Cookie Recipes
When it is time to bake cookies, we usually think that it is complicated, that it takes a lot of time. In one word: that it is not worthwhile!We will show you hereunder that it is simply not true. Baking cookies is easy, fast and, most important, fun.Come and join all our readers who decided to give it a try and now, just cannot stop trying to find...

What Do You Want For Dinner?
Those six words are the ones I think my husband most dreads each day. Our favorite dishes are those that someone else cooks for us. Trying to come up with new ideas for dinner is something that we both try to do, but is difficult. It seems that our favorite dishes come from restaurants. But going out to order our favorite dishes from these restaur...

The Holidays Are Here
I use a credit card for many business purchases. Since I travel a lot, this means quite a bit of money is charged throughout the year.Therefore, I was pleased when my bank had a local hotel deliver a basket of goodies to our home during the holidays.The card attached thanked us for our support, and looked forward to another year of providing benefi...