Saturday 21 July 2007

Madvertising

Our first mobile ad campaign generated over 1000 fraudulent clicks and flushed our daily budget down the pan in under 2 hours. Good job it was just a test run on a 1 cent CPC for a max 10 dollars spending limit. [update: it turns out that only about 100 of the clicks were fraudulent; the agency we were using had an unexpectedly high publisher inventory in india which even at the lowest possible CPC rate gave thirty thousand impressions in 2 hours. We were not actually charged for fraud clicks. They were registered by our server but were not counted in the agency's spending reports] The prime suspects? India blatantly in first place followed in a distant second by an unabashed South Africa. All the other english speaking countries were either asleep in their GMT +/-8 time zones or weren't paying hundreds of workers to speed-click on adverts for a dollar a day. It clearly pays to be cautious when starting out with this high risk advertising medium. We now need to do more extensive tests. With global advertising everyone is in different time zones so we need to run each campaign for at least 48 hours to be able to start making comparisons. That way each country will have 'experienced' the adverts for a full 24 hours during the same day of the week.

2 commentaires:

Uri L said...

How can u determine whether a click is fraudulent or not? it it through google adword mobile?

Patrick Lord said...

You can't really know for sure - that's what makes mobile advertising particularly risky. But India is well known as a source of click fraud. If you look at the graph the number of clicks in under 2 hours is totally out of proportion (8000% bigger) compared to other countries in the same time zone and we verified this in a subsequent 48 hour campaign run over the weekend. Secondly our server shows an exceptionally low registration rate of indian users that day compared to the usual rate for other countries. This indicates that lots of visitors were arriving on the first page then exiting again to move onto the next ad click.

The campaign was not run through google adword mobile.