Business.com--Home of click fraud? Major analysis!

[pielover]

I just posted this on my blog and wanted to share it here, where the pros are!

I've been advertising on Business.com for a few years. At 70 cents a click, I started out thinking that it was a reasonable way to promote our business, knowing that our listings would be shown in a 'contextual' mode. Exposure is good, right?

But nowadays there's such a thing as click fraud. In this article from Wired on click fraud published today, the author says no one is doing anything about it. So here I am doing my part.

Why? My referrals from business.com have been increasing and this month they jumped. Here are the numbers from last month:

* business.com 606
* rd.business.com 55
* billed click-thrus 478

I don't want to reveal my company's site-traffic, but I will say that this puts them as #2 referring domain! This is double last month's traffic, which was also high. Suspicious? Oh yea.

I used FastStats to filter analysis to only hits from business.com. Doing so does skew some of the numbers, as the referral is only for the first page that the visitor hits. So total time on the site and click-paths are not useful data. And then I looked at the log file for one day, when I got 117 hits! Here's some observations:

1. 559 of the page requests came from searches using their 'frame the destination page', suggesting that the clickers are using that to seach and click.

2. Referrals came from these partners on the single day:
23 from partner=2627803
52 from www.galaxysearch.com
Results from other 11 sites (opticseek.com, go4seek.com, shangrilaa.com, tobuy.com, delmonicos.net, emberhseach.com, kiligaga.com, petovia.com)

(And galaxysearch is run by what sounds like a slime-ball (read here: http://galaxysearch.com/i.html?arg=4) famous for being the first to registering sex.com. The list of coersion bragged about on galaxysearch certainly gives me no confidence that his searchers are any kind of target audience.)

3. Two of the referrers actually showed keywords used to search. They were single words of 'cycle' and 'thermal'. Hardly target searches! Note no clicks from internet.com or other major sites listed on their partner page (http://www.business.com/info/partners.asp).

4. 89% of the hits were on just one of my five registered pages with business.com. And the normal search terms for this page draw very little result from Google or Overture.

When I get a chance, I'm going to see what I can do with this information. Stay tuned.

[qwerty]

I'll definitely stay tuned. I recently recommended to a client of mine that they get a paid listing at business.com (and didn't tell them anything about the PPC program). Business.com called them about it, and they had them call me, so now I have to research this and decide if the PPC plan would be good for them.

If there's an unusual amount of click fraud with them, that's certainly a reason to turn them down.

[Webmaster T]

IMO, about 30% of all clicks from PPC are fraud. Fraud is more or less a cost of doing business when using PPC. In this case though these numbers look way out. How does your traffic compare to the projections in WordTracker for the corresponding terms. If traffic isn't much lower then yes it looks like affiliate fraud to me especially since the same terms get no traffic from internet.com.

What bothers me about all PPC is there is no PPC provider accountability. Overture doesn't even tell you the outcome of a fraud investigation. IMO, PPC providers should have to tell you every click you paid for and provide full details. I don't know anyone who wouyld pay any charge to anyone where they didn't get a breakdown of the charges. Would you pay a phone bill where they just said you made X long distance calls for X$? I doubt it. Why do people buy PPC based on 0 accountability?

[ihelpyou]

Terry; Very good points. I never thought about PPC in that light before. Although I personally don't get involved, your post has made me secretly say I will "never" get involved now. :D

Wow; those points really struck a chord.

[JohnC]

I have had some issues with Business.com as well. However I have been able to get them worked out so we will see if it helps the ROI.

1. The Click fraud as far as I can tell seems to come from their "partners". Well I was seeing unusual activity from their (You Guessed It!) Kanoodle partnership. I spoke to my account rep and was able to remove my listings from their Kanoodle Feed. I am not sure if this would work with all partners but it is worth a try if you can identify problem partners.

2. This is the one that ready irked me. I had submitted a page to Overture Site Match (be patient I will make the connection), because I had forgot to turn on Auto replenish on the SiteMatch account, my listing was temporarily disabled. During the time it was disabled, Business.com added my URL to their "Site Match Xchange" feed. Which effectively blocked me from getting my own site listed with SiteMatch. The problem was SiteMatch would not let me know why I was not getting relisted. It was only by chance that I found out I was "already" listed via the Business.com feed. I contacted my rep and told them to remove me from the feed and they did, but it was months of fighting with SiteMatch that didn't have to happen.

[Russel_Crowe]

[EDITED]

[WebSavvy]

The numerous image URLs which you have posted to a thread that's more than a year old, which has nothing to do with the topic of the thread, have been deleted.

Spam is not tolerated here.

[ihelpyou]

Welcome Russell! :hi:

Are you a spammer?

Tell me exactly what good your post did for you? Was it worth the time for you to register to make such a garbage post? It was online for 20 minutes at 3am in the morning depending on where you live. Did it do you any good?

How was your return on investment? The time it took you to register, and then create a big load of crap as a post must not have given you a good return on your money/time.

Let me know about this as I'm extremely interesting in what makes a spammer tick.

[DisVallHear]

Doug,

You are looking for what makes a spammer tick?

Spammers are ticks!

Just thought I would help clear that up. :)

[Connie]

Spammers are ticks!
Never thought of them in that way before. I might go one step further since you brought this to my mind.

Spammers are worse than chiggers. Ticks are a lot easier to get rid of than a chigger. :D

[jadenusa]

Business.com was a MAJOR waste of money for us. Tons of clicks, no conversions.

[spectregunner]

Give us a timeframe to help us put your comment in perspective, please.

Tons of click is somewhat useless as a metric.

Can you give us a better ideas as to the number of clicks (tens, hundreds, thoughsands, tens of thousands), over what timeframe, and is the number of conversions really zero?

[jadenusa]

Approximately 2000 clicks, no conversions. We track from click to conversion quite effectively. We've never had zero conversions from this many clicks. The clicks rack up quickly too. If you try Business.com, make sure you keep an eye on the program daily and read the contract closely. When we tried it, there was a one month minimum clause. If the campaign is bottoming out in week one, you're stuck for three more weeks.

[JohnC]

One way to get around that contract is to institute a Monthly cap on your account. One month I saw similar conversion as you mention, I called my rep and asked if I could set a monthly cap on my spend. He said yes, I set it to $1 more than I had already spent for the month.

[g1smd]

You say 2000... but over what timescale... a day, week, month?

[bigDugan]

Originally posted by pielover
But nowadays there's such a thing as click fraud. I'm not sure where you've been, but PPC click fraud has been around as long as PPC has. I based my Simple Hammer (http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=58312&highlight=simple+hammer#post58312) on a "Nickel Clicker" I developed over 10 years ago (before PPC). Instead of hammering spammer's URLs, I can "force" any user on my site to "click" on any PPC link. Very hard to track, as each user will be coming from their own unique IP address. :eek:

[ihelpyou]

Yes; fraud is rampant and depending on what business.com does for fraud depends on how much money you lose. That being said, conversions come into play only if your site is a site that "can" convert". Many times owners think there site is so great, but others think it *****. You can't convert with a bad site. No way to know if your site is bad, but you have to take everything into account with doing PPC advertising. It may not all be because of fraud.

[jadenusa]

In our case, it was fraud not conversion. We convert 3-4% across the board from click to lead. Bottom line, beware of Business.com and good luck.