When it comes to Internet Marketing...Pay Per Click Advertising has been one of my favorites. What could be simpler then to sit down, come up with a few 'key' words that describe your business or product, list them with one of the PPC's and instantly start to receive an endless flow of prospects and business. For the first year or so that I used this type of advertising, that's pretty much what occurred. Unfortunately, a couple of things changed along the way that have made me re-think this type of advertising.

Pay Per Click advertising offers some obvious advantages over other methods. One, you don't have to wait weeks or months trying to get your site listed on Search Engines. Once you've opened and funded your PPC account, and listed your keywords, you can start to receive traffic the same day. Another nice feature is that you can control how much you want to spend on advertising. Funding levels usually start at $25 and go up from there. Once you've funded your account, you'll continue to receive website traffic until your funds are depleted, or add more money.

Keywords themselves can run anywhere from a penny to several dollars or more, depending on the popularity of the keyword. The higher you bid, the more visitors you'll get to your website, and the more it will cost to get those visitors. When I first started, you could get some good basic keywords like 'home business', or 'work from home' at a reasonable cost. But as time went by, and more people discovered PPC advertising, the cost of getting a high enough listing to receive any traffic has become prohibitive for small advertisers. There have been several suggestions on how to get around this, but I've found the advice to be of limited value.

One of the suggestions I've heard by advertisers is to create a huge list of keywords. The thinking here is because you have so many keywords, some will be priced lower than others and it will bring the cost of your advertising down. Sort of like 'dollar cost averaging'. The problem with this strategy I believe is that many of the keywords that you use are so general in nature that you wind up with a lot of people coming to your site that aren't looking for what you're selling. In fact, I tried using this strategy with a few of the more established PPC's. I created a list of over 500 keyword listings for one of my websites. While it did lower the average cost of my advertising, I received little in the way of business. In this case, more was not necessarily better.

A more serious problem for Pay Per Click companies as well as advertisers is Click Fraud. Over the last year or so, numerous allegations of Click Fraud have surfaced. In fact, Newsweek, and the London Times recently ran articles on this issue. Click Fraud can occur in several ways;

One of the ways Click Fraud can occur, is when advertisements placed on an affiliates website are clicked on manually by the website owner, or others. Since the affiliate is paid by the number of clicks on the advertising links on his site, clicking on the links increases their revenue, AND cheats the advertiser. Most advertisers have neither the time or resources to monitor whether or not the people clicking on their links are genuine or not, so it falls on the PPC companies to find solutions to this problem.

Another type of Click Fraud occurs on the PPC site itself, and happens when a competitor clicks on your link repeatedly, driving up your costs, and depleting your account balance. This kind of fraud can quickly add to your advertising costs, especially when someone clicks on your links numerous times. For instance, someone clicking on a $1.00 bid ten times a day over a five day period will cost you $50. Ouch!

If you decide to try your hand at PPC advertising, keep a couple things in mind; Click Fraud does occur, so you'll need to monitor your account for any unusual activity. For instance, if you notice a spike in your advertising costs over a short period of time, and much of it is attributed to one or two keywords, you could be a victim of Click Fraud by a competitor. It would be to your advantage to contact the PPC company, and let them know about your concerns. At the least they'll check into it, and it's quite likely that you'll receive credit for the advertising costs in question.

Pay Per Click advertising has been a profitable source of business for me in the past. While I can live with paying slightly more for my keywords, I can't accept paying for phantom clickers. Until the issue is resolved, I will have to spend my advertising money somewhere else.