SEL: Impression Spam Impacting Google AdWords Advertisers

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February 24, 2005

Impression Spam Impacting Google AdWords Advertisers

ClickZ tracks a developing trend that is starting to worry advertisers on Google, impression spam.

The search engine giant defines impression spam as "ad impressions generated outside of normal search activity, in some cases deliberate in other cases not deliberate," whose overall effect is minimal, said Salar Kamangar, Google's director of product management.

It makes sense why it would exist, after all, if you can increase the number of impressions to an advertisers ad (without also increasing the click-thrus), you can work that to your advantage.

Industry-watchers speculate fraudsters take advantage of Google's system by disabling their own ads, making a flurry of queries on their chosen keywords, and then re-enabling their ads. By doing this, they drive down the CTR on competitors' listings, then swoop back in to claim higher rankings.

Lisa Wehr of OneUpWeb believes "without the CTR (click thru rate) algorithm, impression spam would go away."

Yeah, but then Google wouldn't be able to make as much money. Remember, they push the best performing ads to the top of the list, in order to benefit ~~themselves~~ advertisers.

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

...the search industry queries new media