20% PPC Cost is wasted due to Crawlers

Eversince I started google AdSense on my websites, I didnt have much time to investigate about how much actual clicks are generated by my websites. I have some doubt by running AWStats I came to know that crawlers (Google bot, MSN bot, Archive bot, PAD crawlers) etc make 20% of hits on our web servers.

AWStats is good tool to distinguish actual hits of crawlers and visitors. It does distinguish it by analyzing User Agent.

Does PPC ignore User Agents?
Yes, most of Ad Management softwares like phpAds etc does not distinguish user agent of HTTP. So all crawler's hits are counted as Visitor clicks. And we keep on paying for these hits.

Is Crawler equal to visitor?
Yes, Hits of crawler are benefits because they crawl the website and they somehow improve search engine listings. But cost of bringing crawler and cost of bringing visitors are same? But wait, these hits do not improve your search engine list at all because the links are travelled through many servers before they reach destination link. And ranking changes according to direct links. Google or PPC ad provider itself may get higher ranking due to crawlers but you dont get any benefit if your ads on PPC are crawled by crawlers. So this 20% PPC cost is complete waste due to crawlers. And no Ad Server uses USER Agent to identify visitor.

Does Crawlers crawl Google AdSense?
Dont know, may be google can answer, or crawlers can answer. We have our crawler which does execute flow javascripts because many times content is built with the help of java script. If we use Micrsoft's DHTML parser, then it does download google's adsense script and builds document. And we search for all "A" tags, and we mark them to crawl. This way "HREF" of all "A" tags of html are marked to crawl. Resulting crawling of PPC ads.

How to improve PPC Ads to avoid Crawler Clicks?
Crawler crawls HREFs of A tags, Src of Frame tags. But crawlers do not generate actual mouse clicks. Crawlers do not POST Forms. Easiest way is since crawler can not simulate mouse clicks, the best way to write html ad is, simpley output only IMG tag with STYLE tag to show Hand Cursor and write an event for onclick. Example below.

</SPAN>Code:<IMG width="480" height="60"
src="http://imgsrv.ads.com/ad?id=2"
onclick="window.open('http://clicks.ads.com?ad?id=2','_blank')"
STYLE="CURSOR:Hand">

We have implemented this on our ad network at http://www.neurospeech.com/products/iespeaker/ads.html and http://www.neurospeech.com this is so perfect, there is no chance of fraudulent clicks.

-Akash Kava

Your forum does not provide facility to make signature, and it is general practice of writing

- Akash Kava
CEO,

as signature, and look at your other forums, everyone has some or other link at the bottom with their name and links and I saw many other posts having link at bottom, if you want to delete my link then and go and delete all links at all posts, do you think we are nuts? i understand links improve search very well, but we are writing articles, we are making you rich with content that you can display to your customers and we do need returns.

If you delete my link, then you go and delet links of all the other posts in this forum, otherwise I will consider that your behaviour is very much biased and I dont know why you want to remove my links only, specify the reason.

You need 100 posts to be able to use signatures with links on this forum.
Come on, you just got 98 to go, keep the faith ;)

Pretty good article akash. From what I've seen online most crawlers/spiders dont follow or even see CPC ads but there are renegade spiders out there that do follow follow javascript links so lets pray PPC providers have the necessary measures in place to prevent these from counting.

Articles about fraudulent clicks are starting to show up in popular magazines and newspapers so this issues will start seeing some resolve (hopeing)

I'd be more worried about the human clickers than spiders Nothing like legions of people clicking ads for cash.

I already gave solution to Google AdSense to replace their ad scripts with Image which I have described earlier. I have found one more logical reason being not so successful in content ads of AdSense.

We have product, we used to earlier run only Search campaign in AdSense, we had good results, then we started content campaign too, but in this case, our visitors to website increased but ultimate download of product and actual buyers were same like before, visitors were increased by 3 times but there was no change in number of downloads (download requires email address post form so it cant be crawled). This proves that maximum of them were crawlers, I have made some better checks on my website to calculate all these statistics and then will try to publish an ebook free soon.

If you have any such experiences to share with me, please do so, because that will make my ebook rich (there will be enough credit given by name and address in ebook), which will help us saving our money on ppc.

- Akash Kava

According to overture repensetive it says the google and yahoo crowelers IP are loged and does not count as a click !
But if the search engine crawls you its good for you... more free traffic

Great Info!

thanks everyone some good advice

According to my website statistics I
advertise ALOT ! in Google/Overture I am talking about over 500$ per week
according to my statistics ZERO web crawlers with there "Header" of crawlers has entered my site
from a refferal link of overture or google..

This is a fact !

LiGhTen
Life experience degree

No way do spiders/bots follow PPC links. Your revenue would get eaten up a lot faster if they did.... and trust me, if they did you' have a couple million webmasters protesting out front of google/yahoo headquarters... haha

What will the textlink look like?

If $500 a week is a lot I am a $2 hooker.

And that article is BS. Filters have been in place for adsense and other aggrigated PPC results for YEARS including geo filters and doubleclick/click cap filters. Just a nice try to sell a product.

Do we really nead signatures?

Links in signatures are a nice way for people to get a free backlink for contributing to forums. Not necessary, but a nice little bonus.