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Tuesday, May 22, 2007 |
Pose whatever theory you like as to why, but an AdWords experiment revealed that people will click on just about anything – even if the ad tells them their computer will be infected with a virus if they do.
Editor's Note: People don't appear to be all that sophisticated when it comes to what they click on. In fact, it seems they'll click on just about anything. Have you noticed similar trends in your campaign? Tell us a story in the comments section.
Didier Stevens, who works for European IT services firm Contraste Group, conducted a six-month AdWords experiment to see if people would click on an ad with the text "Get infected here!"
And people did, 409 of them to be exact, excluding the bots.
On his blog, Stevens remarked on the inexpensive ease of which an ad can be set up on Google. Sinister minds require the crime fighters to have sinister minds as well. Stevens' first thought was that AdWords could easily be used to push malicious content to the first page of the search results.
One of the more interesting facets of the experiment is that Stevens wasn't the least bit sneaky in setting it up. He bought the domain drive-by-download.info (.info is a notorious hub for malware). Google approved the ad.
The website itself has a simple message: Thank you for you're your visit.
(Though, honestly, it would have been much funnier if Stevens had employed the famous Douglas Adams message from God: Sorry for the inconvenience.)
Over a six-month period, the ad was displayed over 259,000 times, clicked 409 times (click-through rate of 0.16%), and cost Stevens about $23 (6 cents per click). Only seven clicks were suspected to come from bots, which Google successfully filtered out before billing.
**Watch The YouTube Vid of Stevens' experiement
Malware crooks are definitely targeting the right browser; 98% of the clicks came via Internet Explorer.
Stevens' experiment echoes findings of other studies conducted by industry experts. At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, a panel on searcher behavior noted: "You could run an ad that said 'bad prices, bad products' and people would keep clicking."
The results also seem to echo his own previous, more intensive study following AOL's Data Valdez data leak. Upon examining that data, Stevens found that for every 2800 click-throughs, one landed on a "spamdexing" site.
Though the need, effectiveness, and benefits of cost-per-action models have been hotly debated, proponents of CPA billing will no doubt cite information like this, adding to click-fraud numbers for justification.
Indeed, the bottom line seems to be that the lowest common denominator (i.e., unskilled or unaware searchers) will be as present in the CPC world as the ever-hated clickbot. Chalk up the click-happy searcher as a cost of doing business, then, just as grocery stores put up with grape-grazers and hotels write off towel thefts.
About
the Author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology. |
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Top 7 Lists Lead The Pack On Digg
 By Doug Caverly
Staff Writer | WebProNews
Lists are good, but if they become too long, readers are liable to lose interest. Too short, and no one will think your 25-word post is worth reading. Top 10 lists have become the norm - but why? Russ Jones of the Google Cache combed through over 2,500 Digg stories to see if lists with more (or fewer) points do better.
The result: if you can't think of ten different things to say, it's not a problem. "7 is the magic number, it seems the most comfortable - not exhausting but not incomplete," writes Jones. "Perhaps our attention span is shorter than ever?"
"Top 7" lists actually scored a 59% success rate, as measured by Jones, compared to 39% for the traditional Top 10 compilations. Marketing Pilgrim's Jordan McCollum, who noticed Jones's experiment long before I did, also points out that "success" was defined as making the front page of Digg.
Top 12 lists were fairly high achievers, then, registering at a 47% success rate. "Perhaps 12 feels 'comprehensive' and 'complete,'" suggested Jones. Top 12 lists were also the longest lists he measured, which leaves me wondering how a 13- or 14-item list would have performed.
How did some other, lower numbers fare? Well, a Top 3 or Top 4 barely qualifies as a list - don’t bother unless you’re happy with less than a 10% rate of success. Top 8 lists did even worse, for some reason. Top 5 and Top 11 lists achieved an equal success rate of 29%.
These statistics could become very useful to Digg users - after all, with 2,500 different pieces in the running, it’s unlikely that one extra-interesting Top 7 list could have skewed Jones’s data set. But there’s also the theory that measuring something changes it . . . If a flood of Top 7 lists ensues, don’t expect to see their success continue for long.
About the Author:
Doug Caverly is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news. |
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Reputation Management Advice
We're doing some reputation management for a client, where we're trying to push
an unfavorable search result off the front page of Google.
The problem is that
the unfavorable search result is from a site with only five links to that
particular page, yet the result refuses to budge because it's ranking high due
to the power of its domain. We've built loads of social media profiles, links to
our client's sites, etc, but the page in question won't get off the first page.
Do any of you have any suggestions or tips on anything else we can try?
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