It's one thing to build a website, but it's another thing to get people to visit that website. There are a number of ways to entice Internet users to visit your website, and each method is an area of study on its own. Some traffic techniques even warrant their own textbooks. But if you have some money to spend and you're determined to make your website a success, you probably will consider pay-per-click advertising at some point.
At first glance, pay-per-click seems like the perfect marketing solution. Very few companies understand the value of branding, so a lot of online marketers place heavy emphasis on click returns, instant return on investment and little else. This is flawed reasoning, often driven by a desire to see quick returns rather than slower but steady progress. For the anxious marketer, pay-per-click pays little attention to branding and instead promises instant returns and the ability to control exactly how much you spend.
Search leaders Google and Yahoo! offer their own versions of pay-per-click advertising services. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing accept clients from the adult entertainment industry, although each service has restrictions. Google refuses ads for keywords such as "teen porn" or "schoolgirls," while the more conservative Yahoo! seems to believe that even "naked girls" implies underage. If you search for "naked girls" on Yahoo!, you will find no "sponsored listings," but a search for "naked women" results in plenty of paid advertisements.
Both services work in a similar fashion. You, the advertiser, tell the search engine what "keywords" you want to associate with your listing. You then tell the search engine how much you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. In the words of Google's sales pitch, "You're charged only if someone clicks your ad, not when your ad is displayed."
It sounds like a good deal. You can afford $1,000 a month to buy traffic, and your site converts sales on your free search-engine traffic at a rate of one sale for every 300 visitors. So if you can pay 10 cents per click, that's a cost of $30 for each sale. If a sale is worth more than $30 to you, this seems like a no-brainer. You win. Google wins. If your website is any good, the customer wins.
Enter click fraud.
Click fraud occurs when someone (or something) clicks on your pay-per-click ad without any real interest in visiting your website, other than to cause the per-click fee you probably will be on the hook to pay. I say "probably" because you technically are not supposed to be responsible for fraudulent clicks detected by the search company. Traditionally, there are two reasons why someone might cause you to pay for meaningless clicks: They are competitors determined to hurt your business or they somehow are making money from the process. With adult websites and Google or Yahoo!, the former is the real concern, since there are no obvious ways for fraudsters to profit directly from this activity, unless your listing shows up in programs like AdSense.
Let's say you are the leading provider of adult movie downloads on the Internet. And let's say you have an aggressive competitor hot on your heels, trying to unseat you from your position of dominance. If that competitor sees that you are advertising on Google or Yahoo!, it could decide to decrease your ad performance by asking all of its employees to click on your ad every day. If they want to get a bit more sophisticated, they could use software technologies designed to appear like Internet users clicking your ads. Imagine a trojan on hundreds or even thousands of computers "clicking" your ads. Ad performance will be nonexistent, and you probably would drop those per-click ads quickly.
And it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which a religiously motivated group or individual would try to harm adult companies through click fraud.
What are search engines doing about this? In theory, major search engines profit from click fraud. If it can't be determined that you actually were defrauded by someone, you're on the hook for the bill. But search engines have a powerful incentive to keep their advertisers happy and competing with each other for clicks: If large numbers of advertisers are unhappy and give up on pay-per-click, it hurts the search company's long-term outlook.
So how much are search engines doing to try to curb click fraud? They have said they're all over it and have the matter under control, while critics would say they're skeptical about how much search engines really can do to combat the problem. It isn't always easy to know who or what is behind a click and, if it is a person, what that person has in mind when clicking on your ad. Obviously, search engines aren't about to share what technologies they have to detect click fraud, or the fraudsters would just alter their games accordingly. Payment processing companies make the same argument, saying they can't reveal their methods without decreasing their effectiveness. That leaves most of us in the dark, scratching our heads and wondering how many clicks are legitimate and how many clicks never even had a chance to turn into sales.
Does that mean you should skip per-click advertising entirely? Not necessarily. Since you can control your budget with per-click marketing, you always can start small and experiment. Measure the performance of your per-click ads. If they make more money than they cost, keep it up. If they don't, change your approach or move on to other forms of advertising.
If you want to get clever about analyzing your results, there are a few tricks you can use. Have you checked your server logs to determine how long the average visitor stays on your website after arriving from a pay-per-click campaign? You can get a feel for average stay times by looking at how many pages a person viewed and how much time passed between their clicking from one page to the next. Compare the behavior of your pay-per-click traffic to that of traffic from other sources. Are most of your clicks coming from one geographic region or from countries where the primary language is different than those used on your website? Are you seeing multiple clicks from the same IP address? You might need help from a good tech person to get the information you want, but these things can be mined from your server logs.
There is a reason why adult affiliate programs almost completely stopped offering money for per-click traffic. The earliest affiliate programs often offered webmasters payment for each visitor they would send, compared to current models, which only pay on sales. Operators of these per-click programs - the ones paying out the money - often found they were being sent all kinds of useless and fraudulently obtained clicks by individuals looking to get rich from the payouts. Because there was so much to gain from fraud and detecting fraud was such a difficult full-time job, almost every adult affiliate program eventually dropped its per-click programs.
If you decide to buy traffic from a major per-click supplier, beware. These campaigns need to be watched carefully, so you need to take an active role in monitoring these campaigns, even after the traffic starts to arrive.
-Connor Young
The article originally appeared in the April 2008 edition of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe to AVN Online, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscriptions/ .
