When Pay-Per-Click Goes Per-Clunk

By Dave Porter

(AXcess News) Reno - AXcess News has completed a study of pay-per-click advertising agencies and found that with the steady drop in Google Adsense rates web publishers were earning other resources were becoming a more viable choice to work with, so we ran a test for two months to see just how they stack up.

Let me say right off that our study was independent; no one paid AXcess News to conduct it, so our results are unbiased.

We found alarming differences across these per-per-click (PPC) advertising agencies as to how many true visitors were delivered to our site, which is usually referred to as ‘click fraud’, but in most cases, it was more a matter of where those clicks came from given that many PPC agencies contract with third party sites for much of their traffic.  Even Google has a fair crop of sites who’ve signed up as publishers and with that comes an across the board problem of monitoring them for accuracy.

To begin with, let me quote Search Engine Roundtable (SER) who ran two back-to-back polls on web publishers who use Google Adsense.  What the online website magazine found was that rates had dropped.  Our own research, in looking back over several years of records, accounted for a drop in Google Adsense publisher revenue of in excess of 70 percent.  SER put the figure at 63% reporting a drop in Google Adsense revenue but they were cautious enough to sidestep just how much it had declined.

In our eight-week study, AXcess News bought ads across a host of PPC sources, which did not include MSN or Google.  So we can’t rate them against their peers, though the reason they were not included was because much of our findings on Google Adsense were obtained as a publisher, which could have biased our decision and with MSN, the lack of an ability to communicate with them on their advertising program sent shivers up our spines, to the extend that we couldn’t get anyone on the phone at Microsoft who was willing to talk about their online advertising - not anyone!  And their Corporate offices refused to provide a phone number for that division as well.  We rated Microsoft’s MSN text link advertising program a “Failing” grade as a result.

Using tracking codes and Google Analytics we set about setting up accounts on Ask.com, Yahoo!, search123.com (a ValueClick company), GoClick.com (a Marchex company), 7search.com, searchfeed.com, adbrite.com and adengage.com.  Advertising was identical across all of the PPC agencies, with the exception of adengage.com, which gave us the option, according to publishers’ preferences when they signed up with the independent Southern California PPC provider, of adding images with our advertising.  For that reason, adengage.com’s results are not included, but we were impressed by the fact that they offered such an attractive feature and so we felt adengage.com deserved an ‘honorable mention’ in our study.

In all fairness, there were many differences between the PPC providers so we took that into consideration in rating them.  The PPC agencies were rated for:  Customer Support; Reporting; Accuracy in deliverable clicks; and Quality of visitors.  Ratings were based on an alphabetical scale of: A, Excellent; B, Above Average; C, Average; D, Below Average; and F, Failing.

  7Search

While details of this Study are being made available, for the sake of this article, it would be too lengthy to include.  If you would like a free copy of When Pay-Per-Click Goes Per-Clunk, please e-mail me and we will add you to the list of recipients.  In order to receive a free copy of the Study’s findings, we require you to take a simple survey.  Your survey information will not be released, but the results of that survey will be provided to all those who apply as a bonus.

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