Pay Per Click Fraud In Refractive Marketing
admin March 7th, 2007
By Michael Dobkowski
March 18, 2005
Pay per click advertising programs such as google ad words and overture
are excellent ways to reach patients seeking the services of a
refractive surgeon, but is it the best way to approach advertising on
the Internet? The success of these programs is undeniable, but are they
really giving an absolute honest return on investment?
A search phenomenon known as pay per click fraud is impacting
refractive Internet budgets and will continue to affect the
effectiveness of advertising initiatives. Pay per click fraud is the
skewing of pay-per-click advertising data with illegitimate hits. This
can be accomplished in a number of ways, ranging from manually clicking
on the same ad link repeatedly to deploying automated bots. Whatever
the method, the results are the same: Businesses pay for traffic from
someone who has no intention of purchasing anything. Anyone can
participate in pay per click fraud on a micro level but in some cases
this fraud can be massive. You may ask yourself who would commit such
fraud? It is actually a simple answer. Most likely your competition, a
former disgruntled employee, an unhappy patient, an angry optometrist.
A company might do it to deplete or expand a rival's pay-per-click
budget. In refractive Internet marketing a combination of users with no
intent to purchase services will undoubtedly select these ads on the
search engines. As a result your practice will pay the bill or be
removed from the program. Some estimates state that up to 50% of PPC
traffic is illegitimate. While that figure is too high in my opinion,
I'm sure that it does happen to some, perhaps at even higher
percentages.
Pay per click fraud hurts refractive practice advertisers by driving up
the cost of each click because many online advertising programs adjust
the price of each click based on the popularity of a particular keyword
and the number of competing advertisers. Because LASIK is a very
popular keyword, it can take just a few minutes to register hundreds of
clicks. Click fraud can quickly deplete your pay-per-click account and
leave you with little or nothing to show for your expenditure.
If you are pursuing a unilateral search engine strategy with paying per
click you will certainly face some illegitimate clicks, your budgets
will be depleted sooner, and you will get less valuable requests. A
bilateral strategy needs to be considered. In the long run if you hire
a professional search engine optimization company and pursue
positioning in the organic listings you will simply avoid any chance of
pay per click fraud. Unfortunately a majority of refractive practices
simply do not understand this strategy. Pay per click can be used
effectively but it is certainly no strategy for dominating positioning
in your market niche. I am baffled when I hear of practices spending
upwards of $7000.00 per month on pay per click marketing and their
website has little evidence of proper preparation for targeted
searches.
Pay per click marketing definitely can assist with attracting unique
visitors but a practice needs a more diverse and progressive approach.
So how can you limit or prevent pay per click fraud? Two methods I
would suggest are 1.) limit your monthly budget 2.) Review your control
panel and site log files. If you detect activity from the same IP
address you should become suspicious and try to report this to the
involved search engine. If you notice a lot of clicks from one IP
address, you can trace its origin by visiting the American Registry of
Internet Numbers. By feeding the IP address into their "Whois" search,
they will tell you who has been assigned that IP address, and whether
it's an actual IP or another business entity.
Pay per click advertising needs to be part of your approach to web
marketing. If you are practice not participating you should hurry up
and figure it out. Paid search accounted for 40% of all online spending
in 2004 because it works. Be careful, be smart, and create a search
engine marketing strategy that makes sense.
Inevitably this new trend in fraud will ultimately lead to lower
Internet marketing ROI. As someone who has championed Internet
marketing in refractive surgery as a great method I am saddened that
these issues are forthcoming.