Baidu, the reigning search engine champ in Asia, has caught a serious case of click fraud, and it might work to Google's advantage.

According to an article appearing on the Bizreport site, the click fraud rate on Baidu may be as high as 34%, meaning one-in-three clicks is fraudulent. Baidu has a commanding 58% of the search engine market in China.

Meanwhile, Google, which has roughly 17% of the Chinese market, has set up filtering systems to try to catch click fraud. As a result, it's click fraud rate is estimated at 24%, ten percent lower than that of Baidu, but still way to high by any standards (you'll note in the article, Google reports it misses only .02% of fraudulent clicks).

Could this drive advertisers in China to turn more of their business Google's way? That remains to be seen.

What is certain is that advertisers should not depend on the search engines to take care of the click fraud problem. Wherever you advertise in the world, your best defense against click fraud is a detection tool, such as Zunch's own Click Fraud Detective.

If you are using pay-per-click, or some other form of paid advertising on the Web, you owe it to your bottom line to look into some type of click fraud detection.

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You know how sometimes you'll do a search in Google and in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), there'll be a listing that looks like what you want, only when you click on it you can't find what you were looking for on that page? There's actually a little trick that most people don't know about that will help you find that well hidden word or phrase.

Maybe I can explain this best with an example. Let's say I'm trying to find the names of marketing managers for business products companies.

I do my search, and "Wile Coyote Acme Business Products" turns up in the results. Only when I click on the link, I can't find the marketing manager's name anywhere on the page.

Well, assuming the marketing manager’s name is buried somewhere within that site, Google has a tool that makes it easy to find.

It's called "Search Within Site,” and here's how it works:

1.  Go back to the to Google page.

2.  Click on "Advanced Search". You’ll find it to the right of the box you type your search terms in.

3.  At the top of the “Advanced Search” page, you’ll see options for the word or words you are looking for. Type your search term into the appropriate box. In our example, you’d type in “marketing manager” in the field “Find Results With Exact Phrase.”

4.  Midway down the “Advanced Search” page, you’ll find "Only Return Results from This Domain". Type in the company's web address into the field to the right of it.

5. Hit your “Enter” key or  click "Google Search".

If the term you are searching for is on the site, it will show up in these search results.

It takes a few more steps than the typical search, but it's worth the effort to dig a little deeper into a site and find exactly what you’re looking for.

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There are three major mistakes that most Websites, especially corporate and B-to-B sites, tend to make. Avoid them, and you increase your chance of turning a prospect into a customer.

1. Using corporate speak or language that's too formal

There's a little secret that coypwriters who understand marketing and creating Website content know. It can most easily be summed up as-- "Write like you talk."

Here's a sample of language that actually greeted visitors to one company's Website:

Government spending is a major economic driver that has a tangible impact on the economic well-being of every business and individual.

Wow, that's insightful. And sure to keep those prospects hanging on every word.

Here's the problem--

It's basically gibberish. Doesn't tell me a thing about the site I've just arrived at, the company, what they do or why I should stick around and read more of this scintillating, "keep-em-on-on-the-edge-of-their-seat" copy.

Your Website should be actively marketing your services or products. In plain English.

Don't William F. Buckley or bureaucrat-speak your visitors to death.

Trust me on this.

If you write your own content, or even if you hire someone else to do it, write it in a conversational voice. To help you do this, just picture yourself sitting at a cafe across from a potential client who's interested in doing business with you. You'd never spew the above drivel in a face-to-face with someone. Why do it online?

2. Focusing on "me"

I've got a relative who can literally suck the air out of a room talking about herself. Based on some Websites I've seen, they're doing the same thing to the bandwidth on their site. And driving prospects away in the process.

Don't tell me how incredible your service or product is, how great you are or how you "continuously work to improve" your products.

Focus on the visitor. Sure you want to tell them about your products and services, more importantly about the benefits of them, but you've got to engage the visitor. Show them that you are interested in them.

3. Going for the Sale too Soon

Believe it or not, if you interest your visitor by speaking to them in a conversational tone and by focusing on them, they will stick around and read what you have to say.

Even if it means reading below the fold on the screen. Seriously.

Way too many Websites "go for the kill," far too early on the page.

Think of it like this. If you walk into a store and a salesperson approaches you and says, "What can I sell you today," odds are you're not going to be buying from that store.

The same is true of a Website. Take your time asking for the visitor's business (and, by the way, do make sure you have a "Call to Action" on your Webpage). Let them develop a degree of comfort and trust with you before you ask them to buy or contact you.

Admittedly, there is a bit of an art to this, but you can probably do a decent job of enticing your prospect to take action if you take your time in asking them to do so.

4. Bonus Mistake-- No Headline

A personal pet peeve of mine. Although come to think of it, all four of these mistakes are pet peeves of mine.

I'm not talking just any headline, but one that tells them why they came to your site in the first place and entices them to read on. You need to give them a reason to read on and to explore your site.

The headline should compel them to read the first sentence. The first sentence should compel them to read the second...and so on.

It really frustrates me thinking about how some businesses will spend thousands of dollars, and sometimes hundreds of hours, designing a Website and then just throw some copy off of their brochure (probably a very bad brochure) up on the site. Copy that has no headline and lacks any thing in the way of persuasive qualities.

Give yourself an advantage...

over your competition. Spend time crafting a well-developed message on your Web pages. Most Websites make at least two of the above mistakes. You don't have to. You can get an edge on your competition, simply by spending time crafting your message so that it is understandable and persuasive.

If you need help, give us a call here at Zunch and ask for me. I'll give you copy that overcomes all of the above mistakes.

Oh, and it will also be optimized for the search engines.

After all,on the Web, you're writing for two audiences, your prospects and the search engines. You have to give both a good reason to visit and cruise your site.

,

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ITV is Britian's oldest independent television network. It competes with the government run BBC roster of channels.

It's also the biggest recipient of advertising revenue in Britain. But maybe not for long.

According to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google's revenues in the UK hit $1.6 Billion in 2006. That makes it the number two ad revenue earner in Britian, trailing only ITV, which had revenues of $4.2 Billion in 2006.

Despite that seeming large gap between the two, Google is growing quickly in Britain, benefiting from a shift away from more traditional advertising mediums like television. The $1.6 Billion figure represented a whopping 83% rise in revenues over 2005.

Think there's room for growth in online advertising in the British Isles? With Google reporting numbers like that, it sure looks that way.

Google is obviously aware that its growth in ad revenue in the UK might be making some uneasy. Google issued a statement that "[t]he market for online ads is growing and there's room for many players within it."

Translation?

"We'll try not to wipe other media companies off the face of the earth. But it's not our fault if they can't follow the money."

Odds are Google won't overtake ITV this year, but if Google's ad growth in Britan remains on its current tear, it's feasible that Google could be number one in ad revenue in the UK by 2009, possibly as early as 2008.

On a side note, not everything at Google may be quite as rosy as its ad revenues would indicate. The SEC has made several formal requests regarding probing Google's tax accounting. There's probably way more smoke than fire there, but you have to wonder about the repercussions of an accounting/ earnings scandal at Google, were one to ever come.

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Google  has announced a change in its policy on indefinitely storing search histories. Google will no longer store data that could link individual users with their search histories for an extended period of time.

Instead the records will become anonymous after 18 to 24 months, meaning the information would no longer be traceable to the individual searcher.

Some privacy advocates hailed the move as a step forward. Others, among them Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, feel there's no reason to keep the data even that long.

"I think it is an absolute disaster for online privacy," Rotenberg told The New York Times.

His fear is that Google will set a standard, and the 18-24 month period will become the standard length of time that search companies retain such information.

It's not necessarily clear why Google needs to retain logs that tie individual users to their searches for any extended period. 

Admittedly, companies need some information about how many clicks came from the same address to resolve click fraud disputes.  But those disputes usually focus on how many clicks came from the same IP address in the span of minutes or hours.  Moreover, its questionable that such information would be needed for more than two-to-three months anyway.

Expect this issue to continue to grow, especially if another "AOL"-type incident occurs.

you may remember that in the summer of 2006, AOL inadvertantly released search logs for more than 650,000 users. Although the information was not tied to IP addresses, some searchers were still easily identifiable just by the nature of their queries. The New York Times used the information to identify  Thelma Arnold, listed as "User No. 4417749" in the search logs, based solely on her search history records.

And recall also that the Justice Department attempted to randomly grab millions of records from Google.

Is there a good compromise on this issue? Privacy advocates would say "no," particularly since none of the search engines has yet to offer a good non-commercial reason why it's necessary to store the information.

I'm not sure how this will ultimately play out. Google's move is a step in the right direction, but in an age where maintaining privacy is increasingly difficult, how do you balance the needs of commerce against the rights of individuals?

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you've probably encountered this problem. you do a search on Google, take a look a look at the organic listings and click on one that looks like its what you're after.

Only once the page pops up, instead of finding the information you're looking for, you get a page full of listings of sites with links to other sites. Usually these are links that the holder of the particular Web page will be paid for if you happen to click on one.

Sometimes you get lucky and there are links that actually help you in your search. But, more often, it's an annoyance, cutting into your all too valuable time and slowing your search for information you really want.

Well, the days of those "list" pages showing up in the top of the SERPs may be coming ot an end, at least on Google.

You can read more about the problem and Google's planned solution in this article from Search Engine Land.

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According to the latest data available, with 69.4 percent of its population online, North America has the highest rate of Internet usage in the world.

Africa has the lowest penetration rate, at 3.5 percent, however the continent has experienced a 625.8 percent growth in usage since 2000. Overall, 16.6 percent of the world population is online.

(Source: Internet World Stats)

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We hear from another corner of the media universe on how ad budgets are being sliced in other areas while increasing on the Internet.

In this article from MediaPost Publications, the reporter notes that the Internet picked up ad dollars as advertisers and marketers continue to realize that a number of their prospects are cruising the Web, and not necessarily watching TV or reading the paper, in their free time.

Internet ad spending rose 17.3% from 2005 to 2006. Expect further growth in ad spending on the Web. And expect to see search engine optimization continue to grow, as some 80+% of those searching for a product or service on the Web use the search engines to find it.

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