PPC transparency.
March 4th, 2008 adminI have worked in pay per click for several years, for several companies. One thing that I have always noticed occuring somewhat secretly in the background is forms and methods of client reporting fraud. The severity of some of which, if brought to light, would have guaranteed the clients swift exiting from the agency in question.
An example of this fraud being:
One client, two products advertised. One product over spends, performs very poorly. Other product performs well, under spends. The agency balanced the books so both products appeared to have average months. Additionally, several conversions were falsified.
The reason I bring this up is that Search is without doubt the most directly trackable and transparent way of spending a marketing budget. It rejects typical old marketing paradigms such as the old “flushing of half the budget”. Clearly this extra transparency removes a large safety blanket which is recovered by a layer of deniability when it comes to reporting and invoicing.
When I explained to a friend of mine (a high end solicitor) some of the invoicing processes that I have seen fraudulently completed, his head spun - and he quickly informed me just how illegal this kind of white collar fraud is. I imagine it probably happens somewhere in the PPC world on a daily basis.
So what is the future for this kind of situation? How does it get stamped out from a client point of view?
- One option is for the clients to demand their own tracking solution, a correctly installed and configured Searchware 4 (bidbuddy) tracking solution can be completed transparent. It can be manipulated easily however.
- Whilst meeting your SE Agency, ask them to generate a monthly report from Google, Yahoo, MSN etc during the meeting and compare it with your formal report/invoiced figures.
- Ensure you have reporting access to the accounts that you pay for, this option is available on all engines. Your agency should not have a problem with supplying you with this although they will grumble.