Effective Ways to Monitor and Reduce Adwords Click Fraud

If you are a regular user of Adwords then there’s one major thing you need to know: protect yourself from click fraud.

Click fraud can happen in one of 3 ways. The most common one is your competitor or competitors clicking on your Ad multiple times and since the Ads are pay per click this will result in you hitting your daily spending limit. Clicking on the ads multiple times will also result in the costs for that search term going up. So in a nutshell that competitor is pushing you out of the market so that they can overtake you.

This is know as manual click fraud. It's done by real people who are physically clicking through your ads. These people can also use software (aka bots) to click on your ads repetatedly.

1. Watch for Unusual Patterns

You may only be gretting a few more hits a day than usual. If that's the case it can be quite hard to tell if there is fraud going on or not. The key thing to look for is a trend of spend going up while conversions stay static.

It is almost impossible to understand how Google’s click quality team operates and monitors click fraud. Their three tiered system deals with the threat by analyzing invalid clicks, anomalies or investigating your own analysis.

2. Measure True Visitor Engagement

But let’s say that visitor behavior actually represents engagement with the site. In this case, the click fraud problem is still an issue because Google does not measure the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of a company’s website. In reality, Google cannot detect click fraud at a local, manual level which is impossible.

If after detecting a pattern such as a drop in page views or a higher bounce rate (people quickly going back to the search results page) that may indicate click fraud, as a first step, report your findings to the search engine running your PPC. This will at least, give you some kind of report where Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or whatever search engine running your ads, can at least identify fraud behavior and credit your account for those clicks.

3. Report Your Findings to the Search Engines

In today’s digital world, being a victim to click fraud is very easy and in most cases, the chances are you may not even realise there is click fraud happening in your campaign. Small advertisers and local businesses cannot really quantify the amount they are spending for competitors to click on their ads.
The most responsible thing you can do to protect your business is to check your PPC advertising costs and start monitoring your ad campaigns on a regular basis.

We hope you enjoyed this blog!

For regular updates please follow us @ClickSubmit

Google plans to punish fake news

Google has announced that it intends to restrict where adverts are allowed to be placed.

Since the US election technology companies have been put under increased scrutiny amid allegations that some Silicon Valley companies failed to protect their users from inaccurate content.

A Google spokeswoman said: “Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, or conceal information about the publisher, the publishers content or the primary purpose of the web property.”

Last Monday, a fake story that claimed Trump had received 700,000 votes more than Hillary Clinton was given a prominent slot in the Google rankings for the phrase “final election results”.

The article was produced by the pro-Trump site “70 News”. Although Trump won the presidency after receiving more College votes Clinton did get more votes overall.

Generally we’re seeing an increasing trend of Google taking a much more proactive stance on the content they display. Where their policy used to simply be one of shifting blame to the third party they are now starting to take a much more traditional attitude. After all snippets of this content does essentially sit under their logo.

Watch this space…

Mobile sites using intrusive pop-ups to be penalised

Over the last few years Google have been on a mission to make it easier for users to access information on the move. They've made multiple announcements in order to "encourage" webmasters to make their sites more mobile friendly. It therefore does not come as much of a shock that they're now altering their algorithm again to penalise elements of mobile sites, namely pop-ups.

From January 10 2017 Google has announced that they will be downgrading sites that use intrusive interstitials, aka pop-ups. They will be penalizing sites that use excessive pop-ups by lowering their rankings in the mobile search results.

Normally Google just make changes and and don't notify users of it. On that basis this should be taken pretty seriously.

This update is considered to to be part two of google's mobile friendly drive. We blogged about Google's Mobile Friendly Algorithm changes back in April 2015 when the first part was released.

An Easy Way to Increase ROI and Reduce Wasted Marketing Spend

Our latest blog puts a new service in the spotlight and focuses on something that we think could really help our more phone based clients.

With hundreds of billions being spent globally by businesses looking to attract new customers it's extremely important that they're maximising their ROI from all marketing channels.

It's quite easy to do that by tracking online sales and conversions, but not so easy when sales, bookings and enquiries are coming via the phone. Fortunately, there is a solution called call tracking and it's helping businesses to increase their ROI and reduce marketing waste with real data as evidence.

Companies like Vontio provide dynamic phone numbers which are served to website visitors as the page loads, each number is unique which means once the visitor picks up the phone they're matched to a profile which shows you how they reached your website, which pages they viewed, and more. They also record the phone calls so that they can be played back later, great for monitoring and training staff.

With yearly marketing spend increasing year-on-year it's now more important than ever for businesses to start tracking their calls just like they track their sales. And marketing agencies should be using this data to prove the value of their efforts to their clients.

Marty Rogers, co-founder of leading UK call tracking software company, Vontio, said "I worked at a marketing agency where we found it difficult to prove our marketing efforts were delivering value for businesses who got the majority of their business via the telephone. Vontio removes this ambiguity and shows you exactly where your phone calls have come from, insight that increases ROI and reduces wasted marketing spend."

Vontio offer a free, unrestricted 21-day trial here with very sensible pricing thereafter.

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NB. We are not affiliated in any way with Vontio nor did we take any payment to place this article. We just think it's a cool service!

The 6 Most Common Website SEO Mistakes

One of the most important weapons when it comes to expanding your business is a good website and whilst lots of websites look great to the human eye they may not look so great to major search engines. In fact search engines may struggle to understand what your business even does.

Page title - Home is not where your site lives

We conducted a survey and found that amazingly 23% of home pages had the page title of just the word “home”.
There are over 650 million websites online. This indicates approximately 143 million websites have the page title “home” on their index page, making the word “home” probably the most competitive keyword on Google. Although your home page title or title tag may not be "home" it still may not be descriptive enough. Title tags are part of the Meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML in the <head> area. The title tag is the most crucial single tag in your page because it tells the search engines and the users what the page is about. It appears in bold when your content is published on the search results page, so it needs to be a concise, explanatory description of the page's content. It should be around 6500 characters in length with the most important keywords towards the front, in order to entice users to your site.

Indexable content

When piecing together your website, it’s important to make sure all the most important parts are written in HTML format. This will allow the spiders to see and index the content of your website easily. Too often we see sites that make sense to the human eye but to the search engines make no sense.
A few tips to consider are:
Image Alt tags: Although search engine crawlers are pretty advanced these days, it’s still not possible for them to recognise images. Make sure any image uploaded on your site has an alt attribute in HTML so that search engines have a written description of it.
If you have any video or audio content on your website, provide a transcript for it. You don’t have to mirror the content word for word, but select the key sentences you want to be picked up by the search engines. When a site is flash or uses java plugins, it’s difficult for the search engines to find any information that would deem your site relevant enough to rank, so supplement them with text.

Keyword usage and targeting

Keyword usage and targeting is still part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms, so it’s key to ensure your keywords are used regularly and implemented strategically. For example, if you want your page to rank in the search results for ‘car sales in London’; you want the phrase ‘Car sales in London’ to be part of the crawlable content of your site. The search engines will measure how, and how often, keywords are used on each page in order to determine the site's relevancy and calculate its rank. It’s not advised to lump all your important keywords in a box at the bottom of your page, as we see so often.
They need to be incorporated in the rest of the text informatively. Don’t worry, this is pretty easy; you can place the phrase in the Title tag, in the URL, two or three times in the content and voila, you’re there!

Site map and crawlable content

Assembling a XML sitemap and ensuring the internal links of your site are easily crawlable for spiders will really help your SEO. An XML sitemap is not to be confused with an HTML site map. The latter is designed for the human and the former plays a significant role in helping search engines read, crawl and know which pages of your website to index.
This doesn't have to be a list of every page of your website, just include the ones you’d like to appear in search.

URL structures (addresses for files on the web)

Poorly structured URL’s are a common issue for SEO and can negatively impact your ranking if not structured coherently. Search engines look for keywords in URLs to help them determine their rankings, so if your page name matches a keyword/ phrase input by a user, your site will most likely rank higher on the search results. This does not mean you can stuff your URL with as many keywords as possible; it needs to read well and descriptively. This will benefit your SEO and also the user’s experience.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. With a number of similar content management systems and template driven sites now available on the Internet, duplicate content is common and a problem for SEO and search engines. This is mainly because search engine spiders aren’t advanced enough to determine which URL they should index and rank. However, there are a few ways to help the search engines and save yourself.
Most commonly used is a 301 redirect, which will forward one URL to another. However, a better and far easier method would be to use a Canonical tag. This can be inserted into the head of the page that contains duplicate content and will point the crawler to the master URL that you want to rank well. By including ‘canonical’ in the URL, it lets them know the page is the copy.

Summary of terminology

Index page: This term refers to the home page of a website.
Meta Tag: This is the code that sits hidden at the top of each page of a website. It contains the page title, page description and keywords.
Title Tag: This is the information that is viewed at the top of the web browser and can be seen at the top of site listings.
Alt attribute: This is to specify alternative text that may need to be used for an example a video or image can not be viewed.
Flash: Flash is a type of technology which shows animations on website.
Java Plugins: You can add additional features to an existing computer program with a plugin.
HTML Sitemap: This is designed for users and helps them navigate around the site easily.
XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap tells the search engine about the pages on the site, how they work together and how often they’ve been updated.
Spiders: These are the automated system that the search engines use to find and then index your site.
Image Alt tags: This is a small bit of code that sits behind each image on a website. It lets the search engines know what your image is of.
Crawlable content: This is content that the search engines look at and then decide how relevant a site is to it's search terms. It's made up of text, links and multimedia content.
301 redirect: A 301 redirect is used to forward one URL or another.
Canonical tag: A way of flagging duplicate content on the web page.

We hope you found this article insightful and if you have any questions please get in touch.

Google PageRank Shuts to the Public

Google has officially shut down toolbar PageRank to the general public. Meaning, internally Google will still be using the data, but it will no longer be visible to the public.

By all accounts this change happened on Friday, cutting off access from its official toolbar, as well as any other third party tool that accesses the data.

PageRank is used to determine the overall authority of a website on a scale of 1 – 10. PageRank score is also used to weight the value of inbound links. When this information was publicly available, it led to all kinds of black hat tactics such as selling links, spamming links, and so on.

Google will still be using PageRank score when determining how to rank content in search results, but individual webmasters will not have access to their PageRank score.

Google gave warning last month that this day would come, which was confirmed to SEJ via a Google spokesperson.

How to Pick Your SEO Search Terms

One of the most key elements during the sign up process is your choice of Search Terms. It’s important to get the right balance. Too broad and the competition is fierce and results very hard to achieve (but generally not impossible). Too long and the search volumes may not be high enough for it to be worthwhile. In this article we’re going to give you the information required to make the right choice and how long you will realistically have to wait to see noticeable impact.

What is your lead search term?

One of the most important elements of your digital marketing campaign

During sign up (or editing your search terms in the control panel) you will notice that the first search term you enter is called the lead search term. Although all of your search terms are important, the first term you enter is the most important which is why we call it your lead search term. This is the term that we will gear most of the home page around so it needs to be given a great deal of thought.

What is a long tail search term?

More words equals faster results

Long tail search terms are basically longer sentences. They are generally defined by 3 or more words. So, using Click Submit as an example a long trail search term might be “What is SEO” or “Reputation Management Company”. The average time to see impact on a long tail search term is roughly 3 to 9 months but must be taken on a case by case basis depending on competition.

What is a broad search term?

You must be patient but they can be extremely rewarding 

A broad search term is generally defined as either 1 or 2 words. So, again using Click Submit as the example one might be “SEO” and another “Affordable SEO”. It’s very hard to put a time frame for impact on broad terms as the competition differs greatly but on average it ranges from between 6 and 14 months.

Keep geographical where possible

Go local for faster results and more targeted traffic

Where we see the fastest results is when you’re able to make your search terms geographical. The minute you add in a geographical location you cut down the competition dramatically while at the same time creating a much more targeted campaign. Volumes are lower but far more relevant. For example Click Submit may target a search term like “Digital Marketing Agencies in Manchester”. We are normally able to achieve results within a 3 month period on a geographical search term.

How many should you enter?

Less is more

You can have up to 10 search terms but we recommend trying to keep it to around 5 initially. The rule of thumb is that generally less is more.

Short and long term goals

Get the right blend for fast and then consistently improving results

During sign up you will be able to enter up to 10 search terms. This gives you the ability to mix it up a bit. What we suggest is going with a selection of short and long term goals. So, you may go with 5 geographical search terms and then 5 broader search terms. This means you will most likely see a consistently improving campaign.

Useful tools

Some help on making your choice

Try Google?! When you have a list of potential search terms you can then search Google for each of them. Generally the total number of results gives you a good idea of the competition. For example “Digital Marketing Agencies” (https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Digital+Marketing+Agencies) has 31,300,000 results whereas “Digital Marketing Agencies in Manchester” has 726,000 results (https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Digital+Marketing+Agencies+Mancester). So this correctly suggests that adding the word Manchester cuts down on the competition dramatically and will lead to faster results.

We also have our very useful search term checker tool which you have access too during the sign up process. This will give you an indication of the timeframe to expect on each search term across all of our digital marketing services.