Jon’s In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

My wife and I spent New Year’s Eve at home and saw the turning from the living room. The various options for New Year’s didn’t seem very exciting. I’m not sure if that’s a sign of the lack of event imagination or our age. Another reason was that we were just tired out. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy the community celebration.

New Year’s in Hawaii is yet another area where Island life takes a front-seat to the mainland competition. Standing cheek-to-cheek in Time’s Square in the cold? No thanks. Islanders greet the calendar change in a way that reflects the Asian cultures that have made their home here. All day on New Year’s Eve, and even the week before, people are setting off fireworks and/or setting off firecrackers of different strenths. But that’s nothing compared to the Midnight festivities on January 1st.

Our apartment has a 120 degree view that takes in a big piece of real estate. If you’re local, it might be better to say that we can see from Tantalus to Kaimuki. At midnight everybody – and I mean everybody – lights off the big ammo they’ve saved for this moment. Some of these amateur shows obviously spent hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. These are not the rich, upper crust communities of Oahu, either. They are, at the most, upper-middle class income areas, but they take their New Year’s seriously and it shows.

The smoke that results spreads across entire neighborhoods, to the point that it looks like a bad fog has descended. But that’s a point of pride as it means somebody’s been putting on a big show.

But the excitement of the New Year doesn’t mean some things have changed. We’re all still struggling with click fraud, watching a certain percentage of our money siphoned off by the less honest. Google has settled yet another click fraud class action suit, this time to the tune of $90 Million. A nice amount of money, but a drop in Google’s bucket of money.

Google maintains that fraudulent clicks make up only 2% of the total. That seems very low to me, but I think I can see how they might get near that number. The first thing is that they define fraudulent clicks very narrowly. They define them as clicks that they can say absolutely positively were done with the intention of running up your bill. These, in Google’s world, are a small number. The real problem, they say, are Invalid Clicks. These are times when someone clicks your ad by mistake, double clicks or when there is no way to say that the intended purpose was just to cost you money. That’s quite a loophole.

The 2nd thing that struck me that doesn’t make Google look so bad is that there are many keywords/keyphrases that do not have much, if any, click fraud problem. Plus only a few ads are apt to be victims of click fraud for any one keyword. Probably only the top 3 to 5 ad positions are targeted for click fraud. Hitting somebody whose ad appears only on the 3rd page, or later, of search results is wasting time. They’re not a threat.

Returning to the first half of the 2nd point, there are many, many low profit industries and keywords appearing on Google where the stakes aren’t that high. Therefore they don’t experience the competition that breeds dirty business tactics. It’s the industries where clicks are $1 or more and the potential profits are high that click fraud is rampant.

Depending on what you sell or provide, that could be good or bad news. Despite the very real problem of click fraud, I still believe that Google AdWords, Yahoo Ads, etc are worth at least trying out. Even if some clicks are fraudulent, your main concern should be your ROI/profit. It’s worth it to sacrifice some money on the marketing investment if you get more back. Right?

Spread the Word