enhance.com/ah-ha.com fraud check...

Do you trust them?

I guess they use some kind of clickers to earn my money. To prove that I have just started a test. I will count every "customer" and all pages he visit at my site. I suppose nobody of this "customers" will proceed to a second page of my site.

Let's see...

ps:
currently there are 60-100 "customers" per hour. so next 7-8 hours I hope I will collect necessary stats.

pps:
usually 100 customers from google adwords result in 5-6 sales.

Good thinking, a check like that.

But be sure to post here too if they turn out to be 'valid'.

Be sure I will.

Bingo!!!
Have just had one sale!
Running start!

So... here are the results.

Last 9 hours my site visited 490 "customers"

Second page was opened only by 18 "customers"

I caught strange "customers" who visited several pages from the home page, who even clicked "add to cart" button, but at the next page his cart was empty. With my cart system - that is impossible. so it seems to me that it was just a clicker or something, who scans the home page and find the links to click from there.

Another strange customer: that's the log: (date and referer page)
[Sep 09 2004 22:45:04] [http://www.revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=########]
[Sep 09 2004 22:50:13] [http://revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=########]
[Sep 09 2004 22:55:18] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 09 2004 22:57:46] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 09 2004 23:03:17] [http://revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=####]
[Sep 09 2004 23:16:13] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 09 2004 23:24:17] [http://www.revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=########]
[Sep 09 2004 23:25:47] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 09 2004 23:27:01] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 09 2004 23:35:56] [http://www.revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=########]
[Sep 10 2004 00:20:40] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 10 2004 00:32:13] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 10 2004 00:47:32] [http://revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=########]
[Sep 10 2004 00:49:54] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 10 2004 00:51:50] [http://www.cafefind.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?id=moreinfo&query=########]
[Sep 10 2004 00:52:20] [http://www.revquest.com/servlet/Search?i=10j1d905320&t=########]

Under ######## - is the same keyword and for all these clicks I payed!

Another strange "customer". these are referer sites:
[Sep 10 2004 02:20:24] [http://www.findbestsearch.com/]
[Sep 10 2004 04:48:49] [http://www.advertiseglobally.com/]
[Sep 10 2004 05:35:09] [http://www.findbestsearch.com/]
[Sep 10 2004 07:12:22] [http://search.revenuepilot.com/]

And another one:
[Sep 09 2004 23:31:13] [http://www.questsale.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?keywords=########&username=liumoney]
[Sep 10 2004 00:56:51] [http://www.seeksall.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?keywords=########&username=offecho]
[Sep 10 2004 01:06:18] [http://search.revenuepilot.com/servlet/search?mode=search&id=2047&filter=off&keyword=########]
[Sep 10 2004 01:40:15] [http://search.revenuepilot.com/servlet/search?mode=search&id=7547&filter=off&keyword=########]
[Sep 10 2004 03:25:01] [http://www.tazasearch.com/cgi-bin/smartsearch.cgi]
[Sep 10 2004 03:27:21] [http://www.seeksall.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?keywords=########&username=offecho]
[Sep 10 2004 05:28:34] [http://www.questsale.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?keywords=########&username=offecho]

And for all these clicks I payed also!

And here i should post another 470 clients who visited only the home page. - It seems to me, that there all are POP-UNDERs. but the guilty is not enhance.com. I think the gulties are all of that enhance.com affiliate Scam Search Engines. I think they bring POP-UNDER random page (not random - the most expensive) from their search results while customer (maybe with trojan-virus) is surfing the web.


So this night I spent $30. got 18 second-page view (hope these all are real customers. not clickers) and only one sale.

So as you can see in my first post, my site's ratio - is the same as at google adwords. one sale for 20 customers. But it's SCAM to charge me for another 470 "visits".

So draw a conclusion yourself.

Advise me another PPC which you think should be tested this way.

Nice to see some stats on this. Empirically I was able to deduce enhance.com is a fraud. I bought $50 of 2-5 cent clicks last year, about 1600 visitors -- zero sales. While on adwords and overture I was getting far less volume with 2-5% conversion rates.

Hello,

I am an Enhance Interactive employee and wanted to respond to this thread.

First, I apologize if your experience with Enhance Interactive has not resulted in a positive ROI. Since different PPC engines use different distribution and reach different types of customers, results may vary depending on the product an advertiser is selling. Enhance Interactive works well for many advertisers; for some, it does not.

Second, I acknowledge that click fraud is an issue we in the PPC search space must address. Enhance Interactive - like Google, Overture, and other leading PPC engines - has a special technology team dedicated to identifying and removing offending affiliate sites. We also have installed a rigorous pre-qualification period before releasing new distribution sites into our network. Still, some bad traffic slips through the net. When it does, we have a solid record for addressing advertiser concerns that are communicated directly to our customer service or dedicated regional account reps. I encourage you to contact your Enhance representative (cs@enhance.com) to resolve any issues.

Best regards,

Enhance Interactive

The problem with second and third tier PPC engines like Enhance...they can't acquire the primary search traffic that Google, Yahoo and MSN generate...so they rely on a series of cruddy search partners who can't possibly deliver conversions..just a bunch of "clicks" that drive up your click counts but not the "unique visitors" count (people who buy...not automated scripts that click away)..

I "may" not use Enhance again...waste of time and money...
spent much time analyzing log data and looking at cruddy search traffic from sites like webesearching.com and searchmeup.com....trash..

sorry for the tone here...but time and energy is money when it comes to online advertising...and though I liked working with the Enhance technology for managing my campaigns...I probably won't go there again unless I hear through the digital grape vine that they have acquired some "real" traffic channels

hi toha
i also find that something is going bad with us also
could u tell me the tool by which we should analize our website :customers or ******
although gr8 post

The above "response" from the Enhance representative is not totally accurate. We advertised with Enhance for over a year, spending over $1000 with them. To our regret, we didn't bother examining our server LOG files initially. When we finally did, we found repeated click-thru abuse. When we provided our LOG files to Enhance, and proof of fraudulent affiliate click-thru traffic, we were stonewalled. Enhance refused to allow us to speak to any of the "special technology" team. They denied that any fraudulent click-thru's occurred via their affiliates. When I provided proof to the contrary they responded by terminating my account, and ceased responding to my emails.

One thing that anyone who uses Enhance should be aware of is that Enhance has no way to block click-thru's from outside of North America. In other words, click-thrus from India, Pakistan, China, etc... cannot be blocked at Enhance.com. This really is unacceptable for a PPC company. Nearly all of the other PPC companies allow the advertiser to limit their ad exposure to North American web surfers only.

Enhance is absolutely worthless IMO. I once called my companies rep to ask her _where_ our ads were actually showing up. She couldn't tell me a single place other than Enhance.com which I actually LOL'd as I thought it was a joke. Needless to say I cancelled our account with them about 2 minutes later. I think a wishing-well would be a better ROI.No offense EhanceRep. Thanks that you didn't try to hide the fact that you worked for them.

Also, as of the time I cancelled our account, their reporting features were an absolute joke. I can't remember clearly, but it seems that they didn't show impressions or clicks even? There was something vital that wasn't there, whatever it was. Who cares?

On a positive note for a 2nd edit, their online Live Chat support is pretty cool

Interesting thread. Are there any other places or links any of you might know of a similar thread?

I have been called by their rep for some time, and was considering using them for a series of new CPC promo's I am launching, but am now quite leery. The lure of course is the low CPC rate, but that matters little if the clicks are bogus.

Thanks for the insight.