Click Fraud-Growing Concern

If your law firm is currently engaged in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns, then careful monitoring of your click through rate and your bounce rate is even more of a necessity now than ever before.

/lawyermarketing101.com/Kevin Quinlan/ 02/09/2009

If your law firm is currently engaged in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns, then careful monitoring of your click through rate and your bounce rate is even more of a necessity now than ever before.  As many businesses suffer from the pitfalls of the current recession, the rate of click fraud has been reported to be rapidly on the rise.

Click fraud occurs when an individual, or their botnet, repeatedely clicks on an ad with no real intention of purchasing the product or service offered.  Botnets are automated programs that act on their own once they are set in motion. Ranking of an advertiser's website is determined by how much they are willing to pay for their array of search terms in PPC campaigns.   The higher the bid, the better their ranking. The more click throughs, the larger your bill will be.

This type of white-collar crime has been growing along with the troubles in the economy.  Although the overall rate of click fraud has been on the rise, the greatest percentage of the problem has been for ads on content networks.  These networks are made up of a vast number of websites that partner with Google or other search engines to place very specifically targeted ads on sites with related content.  The owners of these sites benefit financially whenever a click through occurs, so the main incentive to increase the click through rate is greed.  The other reason can be to drain a competitor's budget by creating an artificially higher click through rate.

The best approach is to either avoid content network advertising or monitor your results on a daily basis for both the click rate and bounce rate.  Genuinely interested unique visitors tend to stay longer on your site than a botnet or individual paid to constantly click on an ad.

 PPC advertising requires a high degree of hands-on supervision, and doesn't provide as great an ROI as natural searches do for the services that personal injury law firms offer. The best approach for web-marketing for attorneys may be to find a professional SEO marketing partner that specializes in legal website optimization and focuses on natural searches.  Once you have established a relationship with an SEO firm that you can partner with, your monthly costs are generally fixed and your investment continues to pay dividends whereas, in PPC advertising, the benefits end when your budget is depleted.

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