|
 With a bit of detective work, you can spot domains that send you useless and irrelevant search traffic. And occasionally, you can nab a bad guy, like the dude we nicknamed Ivan the Terrible. He tried to rip us off for over 10,000 fraudulent clicks. Find out how we caught him.
Domain Sleuthing – An Overlooked Way to Improve Search ROI
When trying to optimize SEM, most search marketers tend to focus on the "what" – keyword performance, minimum bids, paid-search rankings and the like. Often, we don't pay much attention to the "who" – as in which domains, or Web sites, are sending us PPC traffic. But the "who" can be key to weeding out problem traffic from search-engine content networks.
As we discussed in a recent article, Why We're Content with the Google Content Network, search engines use content networks to expand the reach of their advertising offerings. Instead of posting paid-search ads solely on their own search-results pages, they also post "sponsored links" on billions of Web pages, using the content of each page to infer relevance as to which ads should appear.
While the algorithms have improved considerably over time, they're far from perfect. And although the big search engines, Google and Yahoo!, are pretty good at sniffing out publisher click fraud, some of the smaller PPC providers just aren’t as sophisticated yet.
The bottom line is, content networks can send some pretty bizarre traffic to your site … traffic that you ultimately pay for on a cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition basis.
How to Spot Domains That Aren't Worth Paying For
1. Start by reviewing your Top 20 referring sites on a weekly basis.
This standard report in virtually all Web-analytics tools gives you a high level overview of which sites sent you the most visitors. What you should look for are anomalies – sites that were there before, but no longer appear; new sites you've never seen before; sites with noticeably different traffic patterns than the previous week.
The Lyris HQ Web Analytics Top Referrers report shows site traffic patterns for different domains.
2. Drill down to find smaller referrers whose traffic patterns have changed.
Most of the sites that waste your PPC dollars aren't big referrers that contribute thousands and thousands of clicks each week. They're sites that deliver a few hundred clicks here and there. So go further down the list of top referrers to check their behavior, too.
Lyris HQ Web Analytics What's Changed report makes it easy to spot small referrers with statistically significant differences in their traffic patterns.
3. Create a segment to find paid-search referral traffic.
If your Web-analytics tool allows you to create segments on the fly, look for any visitor that uses a tracking parameter associated with your PPC campaigns AND comes from a site that is NOT a search engine. Again, scan your traffic-related reports to look for unusual patterns.
4. Investigate any strange domains you've uncovered in steps 1-3.
By now, you probably have a handful of domains that are worth checking into.
Is a Web site sending you irrelevant traffic? Compare that specific referrer's average time on site and bounce rates with the rest of your paid-search visitors. If visitors take one look at your landing page and then click away, that could be a tell-tale sign that they aren't right for you.
You can also do things the plain, old-fashioned way by visiting the site. What kind of site is it? What does their content have to do with you? If you're scratching your head, there's something not-quite-accurate about the search-engine algorithm that's displaying your ad on the site.
Last but not least, you can do a search on the domain name to see if other marketers are talking about it on message boards and other public forums.
5. If you find irrelevant sites, turn them off.
Domains that don't deliver quality traffic don't deserve your PPC dollars, and you can tell the search engines to stop displaying your ads on these sites. (For Google instructions, read Brad Geddes' blog post, "Step by Step Guide to Blocking Domain Parked Sites on Google AdWords.")
Most of the time, these five steps will lead you to legitimate domains where your ads simply don't belong. But every once a while, they'll lead you to a massive con artist, like our very own Ivan the Terrible.
Ivan the Terrible's Terribly Effective Click-Fraud Scheme
Ivan was pretty systematic for a click-fraud crook. Over a period of several weeks, he tried to stick us up for 10,000 clicks. And he would have gotten away with it, if we didn't routinely engage in domain detective work.
Every week, we'd see something a little bit strange. We'd get 50 or 100 or maybe even 2,000 clicks from a referring domain with a nonintuitive name.
It wasn't enough to stand out on our Top Referrers report. Nor was it enough to trip our mental PPC burglar alarm.
In fact, it was only enough to make us say, "Hmmm."
Then that domain would disappear. The next week, a new domain with a similar naming convention would take its place.
When we Googled these various domain names, we found other concerned marketers wondering about some of them, too.
So we used a WHOIS service to see if a common thread linked all these suspiciously similar domain names.
Gotcha!
The trail always led back to the exact same guy in Russia who had usually just purchased the domain the week before.
We affectionately nicknamed him Ivan the Terrible.
His game plan was pretty obvious. He'd buy dozens of domains. He'd make a few fraudulent clicks from this domain and a few more from a different one, but not enough to arouse immediate suspicion. When someone would catch on and block one domain, he'd just start over with a fresh one.
It didn't take long to add up how much he had cost us: more than 10,000 clicks. It also didn't take long to contact the search engine in question and make our case for a sizeable refund.
Focus on referring domains to keep bad traffic – and bad guys – at bay
If you systematically review referring domains that send you paid-search traffic, you might not stumble upon a bad guy as outrageous as Ivan the Terrible. But you will almost always find domains that are sending you traffic so bad, it should be criminal. A little detective work can save you a lot.
###
About the Author
Like this article?
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
