The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

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Advertising “Click Fraud” Rampant Online?

October 22nd, 2009 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

“Pay-per-click,” by far the most popular form of online advertising, recently came under fire as charges of rampant “click fraud” gather steam on the Web.

Google and Yahoo! earn the majority of their money through sales of advertising to tens-of-thousands of online merchants, companies, and professional.

In fact, some estimate that 99% of all Google’s revenue comes from advertising sales. Unfortunately, allegations of click fraud may well rain on Google’s otherwise sunny parade and cause a whole scale revamping of current online advertising practices.

Pay-per-click advertising does exactly what it sounds: advertisers pay for each click on their ad, usually mixed in among search engine results or displayed on relevant websites.

“Click fraud” occurs when, for whatever reason, an ad gets clicked by someone or something (usually an automated “bot” that simulates clicks) with no intention of ever buying anything from the advertiser.

The sole intention of click fraud is to simply drain an advertiser’s budget and leave them with nothing to show but an empty wallet.

Who commits click fraud?

Usually an unscrupulous competitor who wants to break a rival’s bank, online “vandals” who get their kicks causing other people grief, or search engine advertising affiliates who want to earn fat commissions by racking up piles of bogus clicks.

Regardless of who does it or why, click fraud appears to be a growing problem search engines hope stays under their advertising clients’ radar.

This problem isn’t exactly news to the search engine giants.

In fact, on page 60 of their 3rd quarter Report for 2004, Google admits that they have “regularly refunded revenue” to advertisers that was “attributed to click-through fraud.”

Google further states that if they don’t find a way to deal with this problem “these types of fraudulent activities could hurt our brand.”

Bottom line for Google and Yahoo! (which owns Overture, the Web’s largest pay-per-click search engine): as word of click fraud spreads across the Web, they must act quickly to calm the nerves of advertisers who could well abandon them over doubts about the veracity of their advertising charges.

The search engines all claim to carry measures that identify and detect click fraud, but details about how they do it and to what extent remain sketchy.

They claim revealing details about security would compromise their efforts and give the perpetrators a leg up on circumventing their defenses.

This sounds good, but affords little comfort to advertisers who feel caught between losing out on their best traffic sources and paying for advertising that won’t result in revenue.

One way to protect your business against click fraud is to closely monitor your website statistics.

Look for an unusually high number or regular pattern of clicks from the same IP address.

If you need help, enlist the aid of your hosting provider to aid you in spotting suspicious trends in your website traffic.

Also, a number of services have sprung up online to help advertisers spot and quickly analyze and compile the data necessary to effectively dispute fraudulent click charges with the search engines.

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Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

%%Advertising “Click Fraud” Rampant Online?%%

Advertising “Click Fraud” Rampant Online?

NACA’s Save the Dream Tour Tops 315,000 Participants in 7 Cities

October 19th, 2009 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

We’ve been following NACA’s Save the Dream Tour this year. The first three cities were featured in a case study at SES San Jose 2009 during the How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community session as well as at the Social Media & Video Strategies Forum during the What Works: Best Practices / Case Studies for Online Video session.

Since then, NACA has held Save the Dream events in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas — and is currently in the middle of an event at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, which will run through Tuesday, October 20.

NACA’s Save the Dream has been an incredible success with over 315,000 participants at the first seven cities, with many thousands having their mortgage restructured with interest rates permanently reduced to as low as 2%. Although there has been some skepticism about how they can do this, NACA has legally binding agreements with all the major lenders/servicers to achieve this.

NACA Save the Dream event.jpg I spent Friday and Saturday at the Cow Palace to see the event for myself. And I’ve decided to feature an update of their case study at SES Chicago 2009.

To date, NACA has issued 15 optimized press releases about NACA Save the Dream events in eight cities. These press releases have 2,120,603 headline impressions and 32,596 full page reads, according to PRWeb.

The documentary video about NACA’s Save the Dream tour has only 2,920 views. But it has helped to generate coverage more than 29 stories on local TV stations.

NACA’s campaign includes press release optimization, YouTube video, blog outreach, media relations, and Twitter marketing. Through the end of September, it had generated 363 posts, 300 tweets, 21 mainstream news stories, and 7 YouTube videos.

To get a sense of what these stories are saying, read: “The American Dream is not lost- NACA stages Save The Dream Events” by Clifford Wright in the LA Baptist Examiner. Or read “Thousands at Cow Palace seeking mortgage help” by Carolyn Said of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bruce Marks, NACA’s founder and CEO, was profiled by ABC News on Nightline Sept. 5, 2009. And CBS Evening News with Katie Couric featured a story by Anthony Mason entitled, “Homeowner Hero’s War on Banks,” on Friday evening, Oct. 16, 2009.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Subtitled, “The American Spirit: One Man’s Crusade to Help Others Restructure Loans,” Mason’s story says, “With at least one in every 136 homes at risk of foreclosure, one man has persuaded some mortgage holders to renegotiate with borrowers.”

According to Compete, there were 724,305 unique visitors to NACA.com in July, August and September 2009, more than double the 361,764 unique visitors to the site in April, May and June 2009, and almost triple the 270,486 unique visitors to NACA.com in July, August and September 2008.

Oh, and all those visitors arrived before the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric ran it’s story last Friday. And if the five-day San Francisco event attracts 60,000 participants, which is how many the five-day Atlanta event did, then NACA’s 8-city Save the Dream Tour will have attracted 375,000 participants.

That’s an amazing story for a national non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization. I’m just grateful that they’re letting me help them tell it.

Top 10 Firefox Browser Plugins

October 10th, 2009 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

webmasters About a year ago I fired Internet Explorer as my primary browser. Why? Because it crashed on me constantly and took forever at times to transition from one site to another. I’ve found the Firefox browser much more user friendly, especially given the number of plugins that have been developed for the browser.

The ability to customize Firefox with these plug-in extensions is what makes this open-source browser so special. However, there are so many available options for plugins, it’s tough to know what’s worth installing and what’s will be a complete waste of your time.

There are lists of Firefox plugins that have been created citing the best extensions for web developers or for a better YouTube experience. However, I wanted to create an everyday list of my best choices just for the ordinary online business owner.

Out of these, here are my top 10 Firefox extensions:

Adblock Plus. If you have ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on a site that often take longer to download than everything else on the page, install Adblock Plus and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu, and the banner won’t be downloaded again.
Colorful Tabs. This simple add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. It sets each tab to a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. After a long day of research when you have lots of browser windows open, this makes online page viewing easier on the eyes.
ColorZilla. ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you’ll get a crosshair cursor. As you run this over a Web page, the RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair will display in the status bar, both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 | #FFFFFF). I use this all the time if I’m trying to match colors; i.e. a font color to an the primary background on an image, for example.
GMail Manager. This Gmail notifier is great if you have multiple Gmail accounts. It allows you to receive new mail notifications along with viewing account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.
MeasureIt. After installing this extension, you’ll have a small ruler icon in your left side of your status bar. When you click on it, your browser window will fade out a little, and you’ll have a crosshair cursor. Drag the cursor over a section of the screen that you want to measure. Next to the box is its height and width, measured in pixels. I use this all the time when trying to measure the size of images. When you’re finished, just hit the Escape key to turn it off and return normal viewing to the page.
Quirk Search Status. Search Status allows you to see how any web site you visit is performing. When you land on a page, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google and Linkscape), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa and Compete), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy. I use this all the time to determine whether a site has enough traffic to warrant accepting a joint venture opportunity.
Scrapbook. ScrapBook helps you to save Web pages and easily manage your saved collections. Major features are: saving web pages or snippets of a page, saving a web site, organize the collection in the same way you do bookmarks, full text search and quick filtering search of the collection, and editing of your collected pages.
Session Manager. Session Manager helps you manage your Firefox tabs. If you visit the same sites every day, all you need do is open all the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session with a distinct name. Then, you simply go to Tools > Session Manager, pick your session, and all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them. And, Session Manager tracks your sessions as you surf, and if Firefox (or your system) crashes, you can recover the selection of tabs you had open when it crashed.
Tabs Open Relative. Tabs Open Relative makes all new tabs open to the right of the current tab, rather than at the far right of the tab bar. This reduced a huge annoyance I had with how the Firefox browser worked.
XMarks, XMarks (formerly Foxmarks)provides seamless bookmark synchronization between your computers and browsers via their synchronization server. Your bookmark (and optionally password) data is securely stored and backed up on our servers and is available online, as well. After you install the add-on, click on the notification to set up Xmarks and start backing up and synchronizing your bookmarks. Install Xmarks on each computer you use, and it seamlessly integrates with your web browser and keeps your bookmarks safely backed up and in sync across all of your computers. Secure Password Sync is an optional Xmarks feature.

Note: To locate these, search for the plug-in extensions here, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:7

If you don’t currently use Firefox as your browser, perhaps this list will convince you to give it a try. I have liked my experience so much with Firefox that I’ll never use any other browser.

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Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

%%Top 10 Firefox Browser Plugins%%

Top 10 Firefox Browser Plugins