For an educational company that provides mentoring in media production and business training, I ran its PPC campaigns. Doing so requires observing the click data constantly so you know what is happening every day with the costs. It might be tempting to ‘set it and forget it’, but doing that can cause a number of problems.
In particular, I noticed that the Yahoo! PPC spend suddenly increased greatly one day. Normally, it was less than $100 a day, but it suddenly tripled. In fact, over about 2.5 days it soared to about $900 when it should have been around $250.
If you are not monitoring your PPC campaigns closely you might not notice such an event and wind up paying much more than you intended. I enjoyed watching the daily PPC activity so I did notice the spike. I quickly notified the Yahoo! Ads Support team by submitting a ticket indicating that to me it appeared there might be some foul play or even fraud going on.
About two weeks later, Yahoo! sent a notice that they had investigated the situation and detected $3,900 worth of click fraud. They refunded that amount.
Prior to this refund, I was only expecting about $900 to be returned if there was to be any money recouped. In fact, the amount that was refunded was over four times what I had expected. Of course, I told my boss and he was very happy.
I think with PPC it is too easy to simply not pay attention on a daily basis. One result is that you could be targeted for click fraud, so what is it?
What had happened with the Yahoo! Ads is that someone maliciously clicked repeatedly on the company’s ads without an intention of becoming a customer. This person might have been someone who worked at a competing company, someone who was upset with our company or someone who was angry about something unrelated and want to do some damage.
In a PPC campaign, if your average cost per click for a particular ad is $4.00 and you average about 10 clicks a day you clearly understand that activity. It might seem like a waste of time to log-in and check the activity every day, every morning or every afternoon.
However, if you don’t monitor your PPC activity every day and several times a day you might not detect potential click fraud situations and therefore you wind up leaking money on a regular basis.
Who can afford to dribble away money month after month after month? Well, some organizations do this. They might hire a digital marketing agency to run their PPC campaigns and never log into their own accounts, only glancing at a monthly report sent to them by the agency.
The agency employees may be managing many accounts so they don’t observe them that closely on a daily basis either.
Internal employees must go into their PPC accounts on a daily basis to and observe the data frequently. You could set up alerts to send an email for certain activities, but that means relying on technology which sometimes fails. It also means trying to automate something that stops you from relating directly to your own PPC data and the money you are spending. By not getting under the hood you won’t be continually learning about your own online ad campaigns. Learning is obviously very important and observing your own PPC data is a good way to do this.