Ahh, fantastic news – now everyone can just shut up and get on with things. Google just announced that they will now provide advertisers with data about how many clicks are credited back. In our experience, we see about 5%-10% invalid clicks across all our campaigns from Google – it’s very low, and we factor it into our ROI calcs – and in most cases, this range is possibly server errors, not relating to Google. I honestly believe that people make too much of a fuss about it.
The other thing about this reporting is that is doesn’t do an impact calculation on the higher CTR’s on the ad, and how much discount the merchant received on good clicks. Confused? Here is a scenario:
You get 100 “good clicks” on 1000 impressions – 10% CTR – at $1 CPC the bill is $100.
Click “Fraud” occurs and you get another 50 clicks within the next 1000 impressions – (100+50=150=15% CTR).
Higher CTR=Lower CPC = 75c (example) = $112.50 = Net cost impact of $12.50.
So in the scenario above, Google’s CTR discounter allows you to only pay $12.50 – so a 50% increase in clicks from “fraud” would only lead to a 12.5% increase in costs which is negligible, given the ratios.
For this reason, I’m not convinced that Advertisers are out of pocket as much as they claim. Any other views?
Although these are sample numbers – we have similar data to back it up.
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