2nd Quarter Click Fraud dipped slightly from record levels in the first quarter of 2010 accoring to an Anchor Intelligence report cited by a blog post at Search Engine Land. According to the article, click fraud remains high due to automated bots, as well as the exploitation of security vulneratbilities. While click fraud dipped slightly (from 29.2% to 28.9%) - it still remains much higher than it was last year. And attempted click fraud in the United States leads all nations at over 34%.

Click Fraud can inflate an advertiser's advertising budget by forcing them to pay for what are essentially invalid clicks. This can affect advertisers who are advertising on both the search and the content networks. Google AdWords has tools in place to try to prevent invalid clicks and automatically prevent advertisers from being charged for clicks which Google deems to be invalid. Back in May, I provided a detailedclick fraud overview.

How Does This Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

Most Denver small businesses should seriously explore advertising online - in spite of the risk of click fraud. Google does have measures in place to protect advertisers, but you can't completely rely on the advertising platform to protect you. As the advertiser, you need to monitor the clicks yourself - or hire someone to monitor your campaign for you - to ensure that no suspcious activity is occurring with your account. According to the research study, 1/3 of clicks are fraudulent - this of cousre means that you could be wasting 33% (or more) of your advertising budget on fraudulent clicks.

If you do detect click fraud, there are a number of actions that you can take. If you're using placement targeting and notice that you're experiencing what appear to be fraudulent clicks, either stop targeting that website with your ads or appeal to Google. Likewise, if you're advertising on the search or display network, monitor clicks and report any suspicious activity to Google so that your advertising budget doesn't get decimated.

I recently read an amazing story about a student who was towed by a towing firm in Michigan. The student started a Facebook page called Kalamazoo Residents Against T&J Towing and 11,000+ people have subscribed. While towing companies probably don't have many "fans" on facebook, 11,000 detractors is a huge number.

Only around 75,000 people live in Kalamazoo. While I'm sure many of the subscribers are joining just for fun, when one out of every 7 residents of a town signs up to a group that is against your business - you may as well stick a fork in your operations. You're all done.

The owner's response has been to sue the student for $750,000. Bad move. It looks like a class action countersuit is underway.

T & J Towing's BBB Rating

T & J Towing has a BBB rating of "F". You might expect that many towing companies have unhappy dealings with the public and as a result have very poor grades due to a lot of complaints - justified or not. This is only partially true. While there are quite a few towing companies with "F" BBB ratings, there are many with a grade of B or higher. T&J Towing has chosen not to become a member of the BBB and is apparently unresponsive to many complaints.

T & J Towing Local Pages

T & J Towing hasn't claimed any of their local pages and has downright incendiary photos posted on Yahoo Local Search. Here is a sample of their presence with local business directories:

• Google Maps (Google Places) - 72 reviews - almost all are 1 star reviews of people with horrible stories about the business.
• Yahoo Local - 37 1 star ratings, and a photo of Hitler in the three photos posted by an unhappy reviewer. Hitler is supposed to be representative of the business owner.
• Yelp - 9 total 1 star reviews, 4 of which have been filtered out.

From the vast amount of reviews that I have read, along with the BBB rating of "F", there are some problems at T & J towing. At the very least there are major customer service issues. There may also be some ethical issues with business practices.

How Does This Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

There are a number of lessons to be learned for Denver Small Businesses from this case study. This towing company isn't a large company like Apple or Microsoft which has thousands of users campaigning against them - this is a local small business. In the age of social media, if you don't manage your services and your brand properly, bad things can happen. Here's what you can do as a small business owner to avoid big time issues.

I recently put together this video about Google Places and Local Search over at Denver Dental Marketing to help dentists understand loocal search and how it can help them to better market their dental practice. While the presentation is geared towards dentists, the techniques apply to all industries.

I recently checked out the Google Places How-To-Webinar (below). All Denver small business owners looking to get more of an online presences for themselves should definitely make sure that they get their business listed in Google Places and take advantage of all that Google places has to offer. While the webinar is a bit on the basic side if you're familiar with Google Places, it is a must view for Denver Small business owners who are unfamiliar with Google Places.

Google Places Webinar Highlights

New Google Places Features

The Google Places webinar covered a lot of the features that Google has been rolling out over the last few months as shown below.

Post to Your Place Page - This is a feature that allows business owners to keep the places page current. With this feature you can provide important information like limited time promotions to catch a visitor's eye. I highlighted this Post to Your Place Page feature in a recent blog post on the Denver Marketing Blog.

Service Area - For service industry businesses, you can now set up a geographical service area for your business. A visitor will come to your Google Places page and instantly know whether their residence or business is included within your service area.

Street View for Businesses - I also highlighted Street view for local business listings in a recent Denver Marketing Blog post. Street view now provides links to businesses from the street level.

Claiming Your Listing

Claiming Your listing is completely free, and it is the smart thing to do. Google pulls business listings from various sources - so the odds are very high that your business is actually already in Google Places - which may not be a good thing if you haven't claimed your listing and constructed a helpful, informative page.

The webinar shows the contrast between a bare bones unclaimed listing and a listing which has been thoughtfully completed by a small business owner. Site visitors are much more likely to have a positive opinion of a complete business listing that is kept current as opposed to an unclaimed business listing.

Adding a Business Listing

Starting at around the 10 minute mark, there is a walkthrough on how to add your business to Google Places. It provides the details on what should be entered in order to have an effective Google Places listing.

How Does This Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

Pretty much all Denver small business owners need to claim their listing at Google Places and build out their account. The benefits of claiming and then being active with your Google Place account are many:

• You get more search engine visibility
• You get to add photos, up to date marketing messages, and even video to your page
• By monitoring your Google Places page, you'll have a chance to see reviews for your business
• Google is by far the most popular way in which consumers search for local businesses and services - to be effective on a local level, you need to make sure your local business listing is established and maintained in Google Places.

This post discusses fraud in online advertising - specifically click fraud. Before I get into the heart of the issue, I must first define pay-per-click as well as click fraud...

Pay-Per-Click Defined

In online advertising, a marketer may utilize pay-per-click ads to promote their products. An interested party will read the ad, click on it, and be delivered to the desired web page to learn more about the offer presented within the ad. The marketer is charged each time that someone clicks on their ad. Pay- per-click ads will appear in one of two places:

1) Next to the search engine results when a user enters a search phrase into a search engine (like Google AdWords)

or

2) On a user-owned website. Some users join networks - like the Google content network - and run ads on their sites. They are compensated when a visitor to their website clicks on the ad to their site.

Click Fraud Defined

Fraud can enter the picture in one of two ways: An unscruplous website owner or an unscrupulous competitor.

Unethical Website Owners
If you choose to run ads on a content network - like the Google content network - it is possible that a website owner that is showing your ad may click on the ad to generate income for themselves. They can do this by themselves, have others do it, or automate the process with a bot. Clicks are occurring with no intention of learning more about your offer. To make matters worse, every time your ad is being clicked on, you're being charged. You're accumulating charges for bad clicks.

Unethical Competitors
It is also possible that you may have unethical competition. They could be clicking on your ad repeatedly to rack up your charges. The result is that your ad may stop showing for the day because you max out your budget. You could also take a hit to your quality score if they don't stay on your page after clicking on your ad. There are a multitude of outcomes that can happen when a competitor clicks on your ad - all of them bad.

Click Fraud on the Rise

In a recent post at Search Engine Land, they referenced a study by Anchor Intelligence which showed that attempted click fraud has reached an all time high rate of 29.2% during the first quarter of 2010. This is up from a click fraud attempt rate of 25.7% during the previous quarter.

Click Fraud Prevention

Many ad platforms have tools in place to prevent click fraud. Google will refund advertisers for clicks that are believed to be fradulent. Google will actually seamlessly rule out some clicks in AdWords as they happen.

How Does This Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

As a Denver small business owner, if you wish to engage in online marketing - and you should - you need to monitor the activity very closely for suspicious activity. Click fraud is rampant in online advertising. Given the high percentage of click fraud, it will likely happen to you if it hasn't already. While the online ad platforms do provide some level of protection to advertisers, those advertisers must still be vigilant when it comes to monitoring their ad campaigns.

My Experience with Click Fraud

I have actually run into an episode of what I believe to be click fraud for one of my clients. I was able to identify the click fraud within hours. My Denver client had an ad campaign that was targeted to specific cities within North America. There was very suspicious click behavior coming from one of the cities - which almost certainly was orchestrated by a competitor. Deciding that it wouldn't be cost effective to fight a prolonged battle involving the competitor and working with Google, we discontinued ads in the area. Had I not had systems in place to identify unusual click activity, my client would have wasted a lot of advertising dollars. It is very important for Denver small businesses to stay on top of their advertising budgets daily so that they can identify click fraud when it happens.